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Set Your Goals & Stareblind

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Set Your Goals: This Will Be The Death Of Us

The sophomore release from Set Your Goals seemed to start off with so much promise; guitar feedback and treble-charged licks open the title track,‘This Will Be The Death Of Us’, with some almost Black-Sabbath sounding up-tempo chords…and then vocalists Matt Wilson and Jordan Brown start singing.

Despite laughably being categorized as a Punk / Hardcore band, there is very little here that isn’t pure Pop.  These guys fall in the musical spectrum somewhere between the Foo Fighters and the Goo Goo Dolls in terms of their intensity.  Their lyrical content is centered around trying to shake people’s complacency, but they soft-pedal everything so much that it’s hard to imagine their prep consisted of much more than drinking a lot of Red Bull while watching “They Live” and “The Matrix” over and over again.

Their whole album is one long musical treatise (interspersed with occasional ham-handed spoken-word sequences) about how asleep we all are.  One clever reference to “They Live” comes in the form of a 43 second “thought piece” that makes references to Hoffman Lenses—hardly a fitting tribute to one of the best of the cheesy “question reality” movies of the late 1980s. 

That 43 second sequence is about as clever as this album gets.  The vocals and instrumentation are all very middle of the road; there’s no innovation or originality there.  In fact, most of the music sounds like we’ve heard it before somewhere else. 

Likewise, the production on this album is terrible; all the levels seem so flat-lined, so heavily equalized that there isn’t a single song that has any real dimension.  This is easily the most disappointing CD I’ve listened to so far this year.

I really recommend you avoid this one; it’s just not worth it.

Set Your Goals: This Will Be The Death Of Us

Epitaph

Steve’s Rating: 2/10

Stareblind: Something Left Unexplained

Stareblind’s an interesting one.  Part of Montreal’s Metal community, Stareblind sounds far more like Grunge or Hard Rock to my ear.  They remind me a lot of early Soundgarden with a touch of Alice In Chains in terms of their musical styling and vocal content.

They run the gamut from roaring, screaming “modern” Metal vocals, to raw harmonizing, and their guitar work can either be manic, raking or take a plodding “Seattle” style tempo.  Drumming is subdued and left in the background, while the vocals and raw electric guitar do most of the work.  Every now and again they throw brief, looped electronic somethings at your ears, or step back and let the drums and guitar forward to play in the spotlight a bit, just to keep you guessing about what’s coming up next.

Metal music either tends to get it right or get it really, really wrong.  Likewise, it can also be innovative and fresh, or downright generic and stale.  Stareblind succeed in accomplishing what they set out to do, which is to offer their own unique take on post-Grunge Metal.

This is definitely a crossover album; despite its Metal label, ‘Something Left Unexplained’ is the sort of album that will be enjoyed by Pop, Rock and even possibly the Emo and Goth crowds.  These guys could be the next Seether, if they get the attention they deserve.

Stareblind: Something Left Unexplained

Independently Released

Steve’s Rating: 9/10