Reviews

“…the frivolous insignificance of language, the suspension of images must be the very space of love, its music.” –Roland Barthes.
 
I found this quotation imbedded in a sea of profound words that made up The Silent Type’s lyrics.  It takes someone miraculously intelligent who lives their life with such an incredible amount of depth and desire for learning to come up with an array of poetry and prose as mind numbing as this.  It’s an exploration into the fundamentals of language, its power and its beauty. It’s a transcendental take on the use of words in our lives that sums it all up in the last two lines of “Ink and Blood,” which read, “The few chapters not yet done will come. Don’t rush these words along, the words will come.” The Silent Type uses relaxed and simple folk rock melodies to allow their words, the true inspiration in their music, to really shine.  However, they do so in a way that the listener is left slightly disappointed, craving as much adventure in the instrumentation as they’re granted vocally. 
 
The Silent Type combines male and female vocals which compliment each other very well with acoustic guitar and a slew of other instruments to form an almost Bright Eyes-like sound just without any crying and more optimistic and intellectually explorative lyrics.  The title track, “Of Writing Of Violence,” is the signature song on this album and at over six minutes long, it is a narrative covering true beauty, silence, art and love.  I’m going to take some time to write out a chunk of it because it deserves to be written:
 
 “…I came across a writer pouring prose to a page.  He said this pen could move a mountain with a simply structured couplet anchored by a clever rhyme.  And quietly he tried but no words came to mind. Suddenly he was shook from recognition that his silence was more moving and more beautiful than any verse it rivaled, and each word that dared to pierce it was proclaimed an act of violence toward the signified that his pen hoped to find. But then his lips burst wife, breeched by the aching pride that made him loudly cry, there is nothing left to say.”
 
 I thoroughly appreciated this album.  I think we need a new genre of music, and I’m going to call it “Intellectual Rock.” Hey, maybe it’ll stick! What I’m trying to say is that the people who made this obviously spend too much time pondering and questioning life, and while that’s not a bad thing, it creates an effect where the only people who are going to really enjoy it are those who do the same.  The deep thinkers and the heavy drinkers.