Good Ingredients, Mediocre Recipe

Sometimes people do their best and fall short. Perfect blueprints are in place, the play is drawn up, the snap is long, then the other team pounces on the ball and you go home and sit down and wait for a second chance. This same principle extends to bands: far too often it is seen in the realm of pop music, where too many cooks force someone into a lane that they shouldn’t occupy. This is rarely a problem within the world of experimental music, where often the issue is being too bold or too out of the box, but however rare it may be, some groups do fall into the trappings of a well tread path. On their self titled album E, E fails to break the mold in a meaningful way, leading to a disappointingly bland final product, despite its fresh ingredients.

The album starts off in a fairly promising manner. Opening track “Great Light” is slathered in distorted psych-rock guitar that is only further enhanced by a swelling drum section. The opening is reminiscent of the crescendo builds found in many post rock songs, however, the song and album as a whole start to take a fairly significant step downward once the vocals enter the mix. While the vocals are not bad or unappealing, his voice doesn’t seem to fit with the instrumental product. It’s a whispering growl that comes flat across the soundscape, severely dampening the impact of the otherwise great instrumentation. These issues plague the album through its duration, only managing to truly mesh on a few tracks, most notably is “Delicate Fingers” which features calm guitar playing that greatly compliments the slow, quiet vocals. This is a continuing theme on the album; the best parts of it are always the more technical math rock-esque plucking with calm vocals overlaid. The portions of the album that are raw psych rock don’t ever seem to play all that well with its lead vocals, an effect which is worsened once the appeal of the initial riff wears off after its ninetieth repetition. E just never seems to be able to decide what it wishes to focus on, and because of that becomes a scrambled mess of good components assembled in the incorrect doses.

The album is not truly bad, it’s just never entirely interesting. As an album it flows, and its tracks are all listenable, but with the exception of a few there seems to be a strange soullessness permeating through its construction. The vocals and instrumentation rarely feel inspired and come across as contrived and forced. The album is clearly trying to find a home within the genre but instead of creating a new road, it wallows in the muddy remnants of long tread paths to success, and unfortunately they find themselves stuck in the mud unable to move forward.