Review Summary: A beautiful ride through the mind of a lonely man
I Would Set Myself On Fire For You is a screamo band that incorporates jazz and country into their songs. When I first heard that I thought it sounded terrible, and then I listened to it. The blend fits together so well, even though it totally sounds like it wouldn't. The jazz is played underneath the rest of the music practically the entire album and the country is here and there, and then thrown together in the last song.
The lyrics are emotionally light, talking about the generic angsty stuff; love, loss and rock'n'roll. But the way they are performed with the music seems to make them so much more than that. They become this emotional ride through the inner thinkings of a lonely man in love with someone who quite obviously doesn't love him back. The music brings the lyrics to life, and the life is not a happy one. Off the last song, "Country Song", "Do you hear the walls and the floorboards, singing sad songs? These songs are about you; and these are your songs; and this is my voice; the voice I gave them." Not that powerful, but when they are heard over top of this acoustic guitar it becomes one of the saddest things I've ever heard.
The music is really what brings everything together for this album, as I think I've mentioned a couple times. There's violins, cello's, trumpets, synthesizers, and then of course guitar, bass and drums. The vocals are also a major aspect of the music. Switching between what sounds like four different vocalists, (or one super-talented one), there's the usual screamo vocals you would find in any screamo band, there are these whiny screams that usually just repeat the first vocalist, then there's the clean male vocals, and the clean female vocals. Throughout the album the vocals are switching between the four different ones, and some people might find that useless, but I think it's actually beautiful listening to raw screamo vocals played at the same time as a very talented woman singing the same thing. Contrast like that is either perfect or terrible, and I Would Set Myself On Fire For You manages to find the rare and hard to do set of perfection.
The whole album is about the guy who loves the girl who doesn't love him, but every song is like it's another person in that situation. Some are about how there is no way they can survive the situation, some are about waiting it out for the girl, and some are about dealing with it, moving on, surviving. The song "So This is Our Home" is about getting over it with the help of someone else, maybe a friend, maybe someone else. Because its the clean male and female vocalists singing, I like to think that she helped him get over the girl and these two ended up together. But that's another great thing about I Would Set Myself On Fire For You; their lyrics just link together enough to be able to form a story, and you can interpret the story however you please. Hell, you might not even see the connection between each song.
But seriously, I freaking love these guys. The song structures, the story, the angsty lyrics, the four (?) vocalists. Individually it's all meh, but together they all form a super-song, capable of destroying all emotions that they touch.
