Review Summary: A “dramatically reshaped” ee slowly descend into a sophomore slump.
There isn’t very much info on San Francisco band ee. It’s hard enough trying to find out info about obscure indie rock bands from the late-90s/early-00s. But couple that with their band name being a pain to search for and complete radio silence since 2006 and you’ve got yourself a difficult time trying to find anything on these guys. The band’s website (if it ever even existed) is long gone, most of the band’s members aren’t well-known or even making music anymore as far as I’m aware. But then I discovered the band’s Myspace page was still up.
The reason I bring this up is because there’s a bio on ee’s Myspace that kind of made me do a double take:
“Assembling a small core of musicians, Ee began recording its debut album in the fall of 1999. Ee's debut album Ramadan on Currycore Records. But by the spring of 2000, musical differences resulted in the group being dramatically reshaped.”
Now, I know what they say about assuming, but I
assumed ee had a consistent lineup. I mean… what does “dramatically reshaped” mean for a band like ee? So it turns out, Tobin Mori was the group’s only consistent member, and bassist Che Chou, drummer Peter Nguyen, and keyboardist Sooyoung Park were added AFTER ee’s 2000 debut, Ramadan. For 100 We Try Harder would be the first full-length with this new ee.
A slight departure from Ramadan’s more standard indie rock, For 100 We Try Harder delves a bit more into post-rock. Which makes sense. 2002 was a prime time for a sound change like this, considering some relatively big acts were gaining traction around this time. Mori had dabbled in post-rock on that previous album, so it wasn’t too much of an ask. And with the lineup change, there was no better time to change up the formula a bit.
“Slight.” “A bit.”
What ee tried to do is understandable but the result is an album that’s very middle-of-the-road, safe, sterile. It’s not without highlights, but at just under an hour, For 100 We Try Harder proves that a band switch-up and a new sound just isn’t enough to carry an entire album. What the band described in their bio as “dramatically reshaped” ends up only sounding a bit crooked.
I’m aware this is a silly thing to harp on (I’m only really being half-serious here), but after listening to this, I couldn’t help but repeat that phrase over and over again: “dramatically reshaped”. The reality is this album is a decent listen and might be worth a cursory listen, at best. Anything else is a stretch.
