Reviews

Salt Lake City rockers Farewell My Enemy play a pretty straight forward punk rock/melodic hardcore style, reminiscent of a lot of Chicago bands. This isn’t too surprising, since they are originally from the windy city scene. They remain in my eyes a fairly mid-level band for a couple of reasons. First off, dude’s voice is way annoying. It sounds like what I would imagine would happen if you crossed Tim from Cursive with Kermit the Frog. There’s a pretty decent scream once in a while, but only very rarely do they range away from the normal style, which sounds kind of like plugging your nose and singing from the very back of your throat. Second, the lyrics are pretty lame. There’s nothing exceptional, and often they are just boring, generic words assembled in familiar patterns. Finally, they have a couple of acoustic/stripped-down tracks on here, presumably to showcase song writing talent, but they come off as very cheesy and unpersuasive.  Track 6 (Monday Morning) and Track 8 (Longer to Wake) are both this acoustic and very strained style, and very close to eachother, which seems like a bad layout decision if they wanted to break up the tempo of the rest of the record. The rest of the music is pretty good, once again, nothing remarkable, but definitely something that with a decent vocalist could be very persuasive.  They play a lot of softer-hardcore riffs, power chords and double bass but without the palm-muting and triplets that creates that chunky metal feel. There are even a couple cool little guitar riffs interspersed, and generally the musical writing is pretty solid.  Probably the best song on the record is the fifth one (Your Dead To Me) because it stays with the punk/hardcore sound and remains aggressive, which showcases the good aspects of the instruments and hides the dude’s voice a little better. Basically, this could be a pretty good band with a better vocal and lyrical effort, but as it is, they are a pretty generic, mid-level band.