Review Summary: If you started high school as emo but began your transition to scene around grade ten, then you'll probably like this.
He is We is a Myspace-era indie-pop-rock band from Tacoma, Washington that originally consisted of singer Rachel Taylor, and guitarist Trevor Kelly. After developing their popularity for a couple years by releasing music on Myspace, Facebook and Purevolume, as well as touring with The Rocket Summer in 2009, He is We released their debut album,
My Forever, in 2010. Despite the band only technically consisting of two members at this point, the songs on this album rely on full band instrumentations, which leads me to assume (without the CD booklet and from a lack of information online) that the touring bassist, drummer, and second guitarist also perform on this album.
My Forever is a very straightforward album consisting of ten tracks about love, penned and sung with cautious optimism by Rachel. While her vocals – which usually do-si-do in the middle range – aren't particularly noteworthy (not bad by any means bad though), I can concede that they fit like a glove into the soft, often acoustically-driven rock instrumentals. Her choruses are always strong, and she has a knack for writing cliched-but-cute lines that strengthen the narratives of her songs. My favorite of these is a stanza from
Happily Ever After, which goes: "Inhale, breathe steady, exhale / look ready, if you're ready or not / just a boy and a girl gonna take on the world / and we wanna get caught".
There are otherwise not a lot of distinct details that need to be conveyed to the potential listener of
My Forever; the consistency of this band's sound matches the consistency of the quality of this album.
Kiss it Better, the slowest song on the album, is the only one with overtly tragic lyrics, but the string of four fun tracks that conclude the album allow the listener some time to recover. The second song,
All About Us, contains a pleasant guest vocal spot from Aaron Gillespie of Underoath; but rather mysteriously, most platforms of which that song can be found say that Owl City, rather than Aaron Gillespie, is the guest artist. I suspect that the song
And Run is about masturbation, but I won't go into detail about that theory.
The He is We of
My Forever did not even come close to lasting forever, with Trevor breaking off to start a new band in 2012, and with the touring musicians, likely tired of not being recognized as actual band members, going off and finding real jobs, presumably. Rachel continued to pursue the band for a while as a solo project, eventually concluding it, restarting it, renaming it She is We, changing the name back to He is We, and cutting her beautiful long brown hair short and dying it platinum blonde. While the original magic of He is We is long gone, the spark that they captured on this one album will always remain as their "forever".
