"Replace Why With Funny"
(City Slang)
five / ten
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DEAR READER "Replace Why With Funny" (City Slang)
five / ten |
Formerly Harris Tweed before being coerced into changing their name by a textile manufacturer, Replace Why With Funny is the sophomore offering from South-African boy/girl outfit Dear Reader. Conspicuously well crafted, ambitious and brimming with mid-tempo charming chronicles of love lost and found, saccharine female vocals and produced by band hero Brent Knopf of Menomena, this should be the consummate pop record.
The frolicking 'Dearheart' sees them sounding unerringly perfect, while country tinged, guitar led ballad 'Bend' bewitchingly echoes Rilo Kiley in the quietly disarming tale of growth and acceptance at a relationship's demise, perfectly exhibiting the twinning of such bruised optimism with stripped back tones working for its restrained simplicity.
But deviating from such dulcet modesty sees the record take a bothersome turn. Vastly musically ambitious in it's quirky symphonic arrangements and experimental rhythms, the elaborate direction begins to hinder the sentiment and MacNeill's pristine, candied vocal enters on lacking conviction, chanting "That's when I realized/ I am all alone" in a tone almost completely emancipated from the subject on 'The Same'.
Dear Reader posses a talented songwriter in MacNeill and their potential is unequivocally there. It's time now to return back to basics and endeavour to channel such vigour and ambition, and evolve into the band they can, unquestionably, be.
Ashling Cronin
www.myspace.com/dearreadermusic
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