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Blue2Noise:
Shapes and Lines
Blue2Noises latest album Shapes and Lines is a decent record. Nothing special, nothing flashy, nothing to write slavering emails to your music geek friends about, but on the other hand, nothing to offend or upset or cause toxic shock the way, say, a Creed record would, either. A respectable album with a few good songs, a few great melodies, and some interesting lyrics, too. The formula here is simple earnest, contemplative pop songs built around straightforward guitar melodies and vocal harmonies. Music credit is given to the band as a whole, but all four of the individual members share lyrical and vocal duty. The main songwriters are guitar/keyboard/keys player Rob Sprance and bass/keys player Kenny Parra, who each wrote lyrics to six songs, while guitarist Fred Martens contributes two vocal turns and drummer Al Higuera, one. Sprance, who has a knack for writing great harmonies, and who is the only member whose songs build to a genuine emotional climax, generally writes the best songs on the album. Primary examples are the second and second-to-last songs on the record, Spinaround and Today Again. Both songs clock in at over seven minutes, but the length is justified by the quality of the song development. The former works from a guitar melody that segued in from an introductory first song, and the other instruments gradually build behind or on top another guitar, lead and harmony vocals, bass, and drums. Not until the 4-minute mark does it all come together as a nice development of mood and emotion. The latter is a darker song that falls more in the rock classification versus the majority of the albums pop. A great, dark bass-line and electric guitars propel the melody into a wide-open guitar finale over a catchy chord progression with great percussive cymbal work. In addition, Gravity Pulls is an excellent intense pop song with a memorably catchy chorus. Parras better efforts include a heartbreaking paean to lost love, Smile, with a beautiful guitar melody and painfully earnest lyrics, as well as Portrait of Liliana, a slow reflective set very reminiscent of REM, especially vocally. The album is over-long at 77 minutes, and during the course of such a long running time, the songs start to blend together and sound extremely similar to one another, which is not such a problem when listening to, say, a punk record where all the songs are a scant two minutes long. Here, though, the songs have no problem taking their time reaching their climax, or sometimes, in the absence of such, their conclusion. Some judicious editing would have weeded out the repetitious filler and better enabled the strong songs prominence. Overall, Shapes and Lines has its moments and is generally a decent listen.
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