"I'm like a raw emotional antenna, every day I'm conscious of the way I feel and how things make me feel and how I react to life." - "I think we've all done a lot of growing up"*
Oh no.
"It's that whole early-20s thing. You start figuring out how things really work, and you start having to realize what's really important in life and what's short-term and kind of false. It's hard."#
Nonono.
There's no escaping it I suppose. The whole "Well, we've all matured on this album, yadadada" is an age old musical phenomenon that's not going to end anytime soon. Each album has its own unique sound, true, but sometimes you can't help but think- this isn't the band I'm used to!
Social Distortion left me in awe after the radical
Sex, Love and Rock'n'Roll,
Catch 22's
Alone In The Crowd had me thinking half the band left or something (oh wait) and
The Aquabats changed their sound in a wicked way with their latest offering,
Charge!.
Every band does it, the whole sound change thing; but some more than others, be it better or worse. For Save Ferris, the result was the rather dull
Modified. At least they didn't lie about in the album title. It's not like this was a drastic change - fans of the last album will still love this one - but Ferris was always a band that bordered on the edge of doing something new and falling down off path they were climbing on. Somewhere, someone slipped and had a rather nasty fall.
The band of course, put it down to "growing up" and trying to "evolve" their sound. So what exactly did they change? Ferris's first two albums,
It Means Everything and
Introducing Save Ferris were fun, catchy, dripping with groove and happy, upbeat songs like the brilliant cover of Come on Eileen and Spam, that couldn't fail to get you moving and singing along. The vibe just pumped out of them - ska-punk with a dash of swing and good dose of pop. Well, for one, the question of genre was much more clearly defined in this album - pop-punk. The brilliant horns that were so prevalent in
Everything were ditched for a more aggressive punkier sound, the songwriting seemed to get more formulaic, the bass lines lost the great walking along feeling (its place in the mix seems to have declined too) and Monique's voice seemed to lose a bit of the variating majesty, and be replaced by a higher and softer one.
All of which leaves you with a solid pop album. It's the same band, just with a different sound. One of the strongest indicators of the change however, is the lyrical content, and its delivery. One example and a surprise from this album was its closer,
Let Me In (not counting the hidden track). This one for the band must have been somewhat of a slightly epic undertaking - in comparison to the other songs anyway. This is the bands slowest song they've ever written, and it's got pop written all over it. No ska. No Punk. No Horns. Strings. Yes! The band had a string section for this band - think of a really soft Evanescence. That said though,
Let Me In is a beautiful song, if you can appreciate it:
How does one alone against the world
Find the strength to carry on?
What happened to the way we used to love
It seemed as though life had just begun
This is about as unpunk as it gets. Be we all know better than to focus on the radio single, so lets check out what else the band has to offer. In stark contrast to Let Me In, a song like
The Only Way To Be starts off with a hellava funky reggae sorta beat, goes on to some fun riffs and an almost surf-rock solo laid over with some well placed Reverb.
Your Friend starts off with some of the most teeny bopping lyrics I have on my playlist:
I don't wanna have to be your friend
I'm so tired of tryin' to be your friend
I don't wanna have to be your friend, no anymore
Ouch baby.
But there's still the great funky stuff that made
Everything To Me such a fun album -
The Only Way To Be,
Turn It Up and
What You See Is what You Got are your standard fare Save Ferris songs, plenty of beat, upstrokes, a little anthemic in their own right, a pickslide and DJ spins thrown in once in a while - no complaints there.
And really, if you're into some good pop, there actually isn't too much to complain about. Ferris has some pretty talented members and decent songs, get to put on if you wanna feel in a fun sorta mood. Some may even enjoy it more than the previous album. Personally, and it seems that the interweb consensus agrees with me, this isn"t a strong of an album as
Everything, but it has its moments. Growing up for some is quite the experience. For Save Ferris, it resulted in a decent album that really could have been so much better. Pft, theres only so much you can expect from a band that was featured in "10 things I hate about you".
Reccomended Listening:
Turn It Up
What You See Is What You Get
Let Me In
My own rating: 2.8/5
"Objective" rating: 2.2/5
Quotes from:
*Monique Powell
#Brian Mashburn
