Review Summary: Good, not great, debut release from post-grunge/alt-metal Smile Empty Soul.
Per my rating, this is a good, not great, debut album by Smile Empty Soul. Overall, I enjoyed the album althougth there are a few cringe-worthy moments on it.
First, the album has 14 tracks and none of them are the 15 to 30 second "interlude" type things you find on many albums these days. While having that many tracks provides a good, lengthy listen, I think the album would have been better paired down to 11 or 12 tracks. Again, I didn't find any particular track to be bad, but several sounded enough alike - especially the slower, more accoustic tracks - that if I listened to the album on shuffle I probably wouldn't notice that the tracks were playing in a different order.
As far as style goes, there's nothing real original here. It's just good quality post-grunge/alt-metal. Sean Danielson (Lead vox/Lead guitar) sometimes seems out of his depth vocally, espeically on the more accoustic tracks like "This is War" that again, aren't bad, but just sort of never seem to go anywhere. Many, if not all of the songs have that angsty feel to them in tone and lyrical content and it gets to be a bit monolithic after awhile, like a big slab of bad news.
On the positive end, there's a lot of good guitar work on the album and overall the musicianship is quite good. I like the addition of other insturments, including good use of strings on a few tracks.
This is an album that, after I've grown a little tired of it, probably wont see much rotation in my collection, but I have a feeling on the occasions that I do play it, I'll still like it.
