From Autumn To Ashes -The Fiction We Live

Thu 25th Aug, 2005 in Music Reviews

Sigh. From Autumn To Ashes’ new release The Fiction We Live is little more than teeth-grindingly predictable emo. The 11 tracks are chock full of yelled hardcore verses and sung choruses, and in truth, the singing ain’t that good.

Opener The After Dinner Payback contains some hardcore-style, precise drumming, which is all well and good, but the yelled vocals contain few surprises. Things worsen with the emo back-up vocals, which sound quite weak and out of place.

Lilacs and Lolita continues with the good drumming, but the unremarkable chorus is all about angst and triumphant vocals.

By Milligram Smile even the hardcore vocals are inherently annoying, but a small surprise is yielded, with the high-pitched guitar work that appears during the chorus being in direct contrast to the rest of the song.

The album also delves into the slow, pretty songs quite a bit. The slowly picked guitar rears its head in No Trivia and The Second Wrong Makes You Feel Right, the latter containing some anguished, screamed vocals that come off sounding more hilarious than they do tortured.

Aside from angst-ridden lyrics and song titles (Alive Out Of Habit, I’m The Best At Ruining My Life), the piece de resistance would HAVE to be Autumn’s Monologue, featuring the guest vocals of one Melanie Wills. This unremarkable, slow track opens with the lyrics “Oh why can’t I be what you need?”. But that’s not all. Her soul-searching questions are answered with track ten The Fiction We Live (Responding To Autumn’s Monologue), which begins with the equally trite “you might be just what I need, no I would not change a thing”. Oh boy.

Perhaps the biggest surprise of the album is Every Reason To which begins with some semblance of a thrashy musical intro, except for that the drums sound a bit tinny. There is a bit of a guitar surprise again in Alive Out Of Habit, with swift, buzzing guitar making an appearance. I would say that these glimmers of good guitar work are frustratingly indicative of a greater talent, except that no amount of good guitar work could pull this album from the deepest depths of paint-by-numbers hard verse/pretty chorus emo.

I am well aware that From Autumn To Ashes have more than a few fans who avidly appreciate their brand of earnest music, but I cannot understand why a bit more variety wasn’t exercised with this album. Instead, the brief moments of grunt have been lost beneath a wave of torment and predictability.