Reviews

Anytime I get anything in the mail with the coveted East/West logo, I usually break a nice smile, make some tea, pop it in the trusty Discman, and give it a whirl while I go about my day-day-activity.  I’m almost always a big fan of anything they decide to brand themselves on…almost.  This is the exception.  It took effort to listen to this CD and try and find a few good things about it. 
 
The first track is their title song, “The Balancing Act,” a little weird to begin with it, but hey, no big deal.  Having never heard this band before, I was excited to hear something new.  Well, as many times as I’ve listened to this track, I can’t find anything to grasp onto.  It’s not bad though.  Ok enough of this, skip ahead.
 
“So Shall It Be” begins with a simple, catchy clean guitar part and a simple upbeat drum part.  So far I’m hooked on this song, it sounds pretty good.  This is definitely the stand-out track on the album.  It’s a very relaxing tune, with an epic, melodic “hallelujah” chorus at the end, featuring what I’m guessing is a guest female vocalist.  The lyrics are simple, but they get the point across that they are very into what they’re feeling right now.  It’s nothing ground breaking, but it sounds great, especially for a band which I consider is relatively new.
 
Unfortunately, the rest of the album doesn’t come close to anything I would listen to again.  There are spots of certain songs which sound decent, but why would you replay an album that only sounds decent?  I wouldn’t.  A lot of the songs just sound completely out of place.  “Case of Emergency” sounds like a bad 90s punk-rock song, and then they scream in it.  It just sounds terrible and incredibly amateur.
 
The style and quality from song to song runs too big of a gamut.  I still don’t understand what kind of a style they’re going for.  A lot of the songs even sound like it was recorded at a different studio.  With further investigation I found out that this album features 14 tracks, some new and some old.  Big mistake, gentlemen.  That would be a wonderful idea if you already had 2-3 solid releases out already.  It’s too early in this stage of the game to be compiling 14 songs onto an album.
 
To be honest, I have been toying between a one- and two-star rating for this album for days.  I couldn’t decide.  I felt like they deserved more credit than one-star.  But I need to be fair.  If four songs or so were not on the album, a two-star rating would have been earned.  There is no replay value of this album, except for the song I noted earlier, “So Shall It Be.”  If they wrote more songs like this one, I might consider a second listen.  But for right now, this album will retire into the depths of the internet.  Will they be heard from again?  Time will tell.