Reviews

I keep hoping that emocore will die out. I don’t mean hardcore with emotion, I mean the explosion of bands that try desperately to be another Thursday or Taking Back Sunday. Generally by this I mean emotional lyrics mixed with schizophrenic mixing of hardcore riffs and screaming with quieter melodic parts and singing. It seems like every time I get a new cd of this stuff it gets worse. This is the latest. Whiny and generic, Endicott fail miserably at a formula which is already bursting from its seams with other whiny and generic bands. 
 
The lead singer follows the formula, ranging back and forth from singing to screaming, singing from the back of his throat kermit-style and adding a vocal trill that sounds like a poor version of the emphasis that the new bomb turks use...think wannabe Mick Jagger here. The scream is that wet falsetto sounding one like the guy from atreyu, sung all from the head with no power behind it, sounding half like spitting and half like screaming. The lyrics sound like they were put through a generic sad-morbid lyric generator that spews out random combinations of “affected” words to create depressed-emo songs. The song titles should give a clue here: a song for hearts, waiting to exhale, black anniversary, death sentence, etc. The guitars and bass are common at best, rehashing lines heard consistently without adding anything new to make them their own. The drums are proactive, seeming to be reaching for an as I lay dying type riff by throwing in mad double bass triplets in the middle of nowhere, but can’t seem to stay tight or within the music, breaking on top of the music instead, too loud and too messy. The songs are also long with very little structure besides verse-chorus, and to top it off, the last song is eight minutes long with only three changes in progression and a couple little accouterments interspersed.
 
Overall, this cd lacks. It tries but lacks effort. It attempts but lacks results. The words in ink don’t lie, as long as they read “not recommended.”