Review Summary: Painfully nasal vocals, bonehead musical decisions and a blatant lack of originality mark a solid step backward for Farewell, My Love.
Theatrical influences will almost always boost up the quality of a musical work if used in a way that compliments the overall sound; for this reason, Farewell, My Love’s first EP “A Dance You Won’t Forget” worked very well. However on this EP they’ve lost the edge they had over the competition and have embraced the more vapid parts of their sound. Farewell, My Love has crafted a new EP that not only fails to stand up against their previous work, but is blatantly average in every way possible.
So what are we offered here with the “Mirror, Mirror EP?” We’re offered three original tracks, a cover of Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life”, and an acoustic rehash of one of the band’s original songs. The biggest flaw with this EP is the new vocalist, Ryan Howell. While the previous vocalist sounded like a solid mix between Patrick Stump (Fall out Boy) and Ronnie Radke (Escape the Fate, Falling in Reverse), Ryan has possibly the most nasally tone out of any vocalist I’ve ever heard in the genre. It’s one of the rare cases where the natural tone of someone’s voice outweighs how well they’re able to use it. It’s a shame though as Ryan has quite an impressive span with his vocal chords; his voice is able to soar into an incredibly solid high range and he has a knack for creating catchy melodies such as in the intro of “Skip the Memories.” Sadly though, his macabre tone kills a lot of the potential, drive and catchy moments that could have been put forth. The lyricism has the cultural complexities of a thirteen year old girl’s diary; so basically none whatsoever. It’s almost unbearably immature with the exception of the Bon Jovi cover and the acoustic redo of “Just Another Soul.” Both of those songs weren’t written by Ryan Howell, so they’re excluded from the bad bunch.
How does the music itself fair? Well, it’s listenable, but that’s about it. There’s no denying that the musicianship is definitely intricate in certain places, such as the lengthy guitar solo in “My Perfect Thing”, but something’s missing. It’s as though all the passion that fueled their debut EP vanished without a trace. Every riff, chug and drum fill just feels like it’s going through the motions and every song drags along like a chore. The paper thin production doesn’t help its cause either, nothing on this EP has impact, it’s completely inoffensive in every sense of the word. Another aggravating trait this band has picked up is the sheer ability to hold back where they could have obviously gone much farther. A good example would be in the title track “Mirror Mirror”, there’s an arguably catchy build up which leads into a solo which starts to pick up pace and go somewhere, then it just dives right back into the nasally and annoying chorus. It leaves the taste of wasted potential in one’s ears. It’s also worth noting that the acoustic version of “Just Another Soul” is completely lacking in any of the emotion that went forth into the original recording and is without a doubt the worst track on this EP.
This could have been a lot worse; if it were not for the technical skill of the instrumentalists this EP would have had almost no appeal. This band has a long way to go if they want to make this new style of theirs work, namely the vocalist needs to work on his tone and they need to vamp up their production values. Until such time that they can figure out what they want to do, they’ll be forever stuck in this phase of going through the motions with their music. This release is the definition of terribly executed potential.
The Best: “My Perfect Thing, Mirror Mirror, Skip the Memories.”
The Worst: “Just Another Soul (Acoustic)”
