MGF Reviews Soular – Love Crash Heal

Reviews


Soular – Love Crash Heal
Astonish Entertainment (4/10/07)
Rock / Pop

Like Muse’s immature younger brother, Soular wanders through 40.3 minutes of whiney, unoriginal pop ballads that border on absolute meaninglessness. They try so hard to take themselves so seriously, that somewhere it was forgotten that they are supposed to entertain an audience, not their own flawed egos. There is a really good reason why this album didn’t come with a lyrics booklet. This music is meant to make barely legal teen girls swoon and to make barely legal teen boys put it on their stereos to make the barely legal teen girls swoon. You can call this album passionate, but I don’t believe for a second that whomever wrote these songs believes in them whatsoever.

I picture these four young lads sitting at some local diner talking about forming a band. Their plan: to steal the sound of Coldplay, Muse and Radiohead rehash it into completely safe melodic rock wastes of space, slip in unnoticed under the blanketed fame of The Fray, get a ballad on Grey’s Anatomy or perhaps a cell phone commercial, and let the checks roll in. It really seems that they just didn’t try very hard. I have heard each one of these songs by other, more talented, artists and the lyrics are so heavy-handed my eyes hurt from rolling so much.

The band’s MySpace profile states:

With their new release, “Love Crash Heal”, Soular wanted to build off of their EP, Waiting for Tomorrow, which was written in roughly two weeks and came out very naturally. The band wanted to keep the EP’s organic atmosphere and the improvised studio moments, but polish the rough spots, and so they emerged with “Love Crash Heal”

Strangely enough, this is exactly what the albums sounds like… a loosely tied together string of moments that don’t fit together as a whole; a studio jerk-off session of people believing themselves to be brilliant musicians with no need for production value. Want to know what else “came out very naturally”? The crap I took this morning.

If I were a teacher, and God knows the way my career is headed I am going to wind up being a disgruntled my-dreams-are-dead-so-I-am-going-to-take-it-out-on-the-students teacher, I would do two things. First, I would call this album out for plagiarism. If the band could make a good enough case for why this isn’t just stolen music, I would let them know how disappointed I was in them. I would explain that it seems like they just “pulled an all nighter” and didn’t even really try. Marsh Shamburger, Jared Ashcraft, Brian Lee, Ian Byrd: please step to the front of the class and explain yourself.

I guess to sum up here, if you are 15, fancy yourself a sensitive artist, and love to take web cam photos of yourself at strange angles. You will probably like this album before you discover good music. Godspeed.

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