Review Summary: Is there a way to un-open this letter?
You'd think that Joey Brown's second EP,
An Open Letter would be something quirky and fun considering its unabashed attraction towards the progressive realm of music, but even though Brown is off making hardcore tracks out of his incomprehensible howl and his atonal acoustic guitar, nothing seems to stand out. That is unless you take out how much it stands out in terms of how big of a musical faux-pas it is. And trust me, it's a very large one. Shocking, too, considering that Brown's sophomore effort is a short one, featuring four tracks; still, the way he eschews anything even mildly entertaining is disturbing.
Very disturbing.
Throughout, Brown's guitar is columned next him, along with some cheap electronic programming and an inability to develop music ideas. Due to this, the EP sounds rushed, threadbare, grating, and laughable. Try your best not to chuckle at the opener's first howls. I dare you. In fact, try not to laugh at how poor a job he did at crafting a hardcore track almost entirely from electronics and said acoustic guitar. Then venture into the succeeding tracks, which, while not as big of failures, still come off as vomit-inducing takes on indie, electronic, acoustic, hardcore, and related genres. Worse yet is that Brown sounds so unbearably bored for the EP's duration. I've never heard someone less passionate or so uncomfortably disconnected from his own sounds - and this lack of emotion (or perhaps just the inability to express it well) affects so much of
An Open Letter it annihilates any and all potential the release once had. His guitar playing sounds like a rushed flurry of random notes, while his ideas seem like slapdash juxtapositions. His monotone just lurks over the songs with neither purpose nor direction, and the journey through the rampant, epileptic mind of this fourteen-year-old boy is a jarring experience in one of the worst ways possible.
Sounds pretty ***ing cool, right?
