The Early November -Acoustic

Fri 26th Aug, 2005 in Music Reviews

Some songs are better off left handled by the entire band and they should have talked to Ace Enders, the lead singer for The Early November, about this before he flicked the record button for this EP.

This band from America have been around for a few years. The band are Ace Enders (guitar/vocals), Joe Marro (guitar), Sergio Anello (bass) and Jeff Krummer (drums) and playing as a quartet they seem to flow together like a young band should. 

If you listen to some of the songs on their debut album, The Room’s Too Cold you can hear some talented playing and a fairly tight rhythm section involved in the recording.

Unfortunately, this group of songs, stripped back to the roots, to show how the band writes their songs, should have been left in the demo room. Without the rest of the band fleshing the songs out, the weakness of Ace’s playing and singing don’t make the listener want to find out too much more. If the rest of the boys had added their touch, we would have at least been granted some powerful sounding emotion instead we are subjected to a steady strumming of the acoustic guitar with not much variance.

Teen angst presented in such a format either has to be extremely well written or well presented to involve the audience, think Willy Mason at his best. Songs like Ever So Sweet and Come Back just don’t enable us to really care how about the singers plights. Without the ‘oomph’ of the rest of band, we are left with a winter fast approaching.

The not so subtle playing on the acoustic makes we worry more about the guitarists’ hands and whether he will be able to ever pick up a guitar again. This is not what I want to worry about when I listen to a recording, it’s more about the music. All in all fairly disappointing effort for a band that has shown some talent recording as a band, yet has not given us that here.