Artist: Bedlight For Blue Eyes
Label: Trustkill Records
Release: 2007
Unbelievable. These days, getting more crap for more money is hardly news. How much of it we can stomach is entirely up to us anyway. Judging by the trend, we’re gulping down more and more of it, and we’ll keep on doing it! The emotional manipulators just lurk in the shadows, diligently counting our cash.
It breaks my heart that the “emo kids” from New Jersey took a step backwards after the promise of their budding debut “The Dawn” (2005). The first factor behind it is a completely overhauled lineup. On “Life On Life’s Terms”, Bedlight For Blue Eyes are down to a mere quartet, and the bass lines in the studio were (out of sheer necessity) handled by both guitarists. The bassist’s departure, a swap on one of the two guitars and, most importantly, a change on lead vocals on top of it all, definitely had a hand in giving us a new album with seriously shaky musical foundations, indecisive and with no clear direction. In other words, it’s missing the basic hallmarks of seriousness and authenticity at the core of the band, which the debut noticeably had. New singer Daniel Rinaldi is nowhere near as charismatic a vocalist as his predecessor Christian A. Guerrero. On top of that, Rinaldi comes off one-directional and one-dimensional, and he fails to conjure up the vibe that would convince you the guy’s heart is in it. Leaning on textbook-correct singing just doesn’t cut it. Rinaldi can sing, but he lacks feeling. The vocals are pathetic and whiny, sugared to the max. Sure, the lyrics reflecting the upbringing of today’s American youth, with their bowl of cornflakes, bored-out-of-their-skull ass-picking, PlayStation record-smashing and carefree, self-satisfied belief that they know everything, show that the riffing behind Bedlight For Blue Eyes, which springs from the very point of rock ‘n’ roll, stopped understanding that culture long ago, because it can no longer find the link to rock’s primal roots. It’s downright funny to hear a transitional flourish that bands played in the early eighties over the vocalist’s girly sniveling, because the whole thing just doesn’t fit together. You imitate the riffing of bands who lived that riffing, and you bolt on a life principle of the present day that doesn’t get it and can’t keep up with it. You could call that today’s artificial rockerdom, or wannabe rockerdom, whose stench instantly repels every healthy nose still alive. Stand firmly behind expressing your principles, or else shut up and crap yourself to death from excessive whining and the urge to please the crowd. Sadly, “Life On Life’s Terms” bows to the latter trend.
So the band has lost the charm and fire of its big potential in the trendy emo core genre. They sacrificed nothing but the quality of the songwriting and the effective stringing together of different moods, and ended up in the quality below-average zone of castrated, toothless expression, where similar bands swarm like a small sea. So, if on “The Dawn” Bedlight For Blue Eyes were still successfully smashing the danger of formulaic predictability, of a withered selection of long-faded motifs taking priority over atmosphere, here it’s the other way around. The atmosphere that would have covered up the formula is missing, and the slick one-dimensionality of what was once rich information (and is now information-free) screams out loud on “Life On Life’ Terms”. The vocals do nothing more than stage the whiny blabbering of a band whose members can’t manage to grow up into men. Given the band members’ earlier lofty announcements that they intended to take the atmospherics of the new album’s music to a considerably higher level and add an even heavier tonnage of aggressive riffing compared to “The Dawn”, we get neither one nor the other, and at best a degradation. I’m afraid the story ends here for Bedlight for Blue Eyes with this album. The current status of opening act on tours will be interesting to them for a while, even more than exciting. Then they’ll discover they’re really just threshing empty straw, and turn to the further stay-at-home conformism of other areas of everyday life, hopefully with more success. One of the new album’s tracks is called Waste My Time! And it really is a waste of every second spent rubbing the tiny hairs of your inner ear with the frequencies of “Life On Life’s Terms”. Sorry, guys. You won’t be getting My Chemical Romance-style popularity.
Lineup
Daniel Rinaldi – vocals
Derek Webber – guitar, bass guitar
Daniel Taylor – guitar, bass guitar
Itzhak ishburg – drums
Production
Zaxk Odom & Kenneth Mount
Track list
1. The City And the Ghost
2. Waste My Time
3. Ms. Shapes
4. Whole Again
5. Walk With Me
6. Life On Life’s Terms
7. Too Late For Us
8. Broken Door
9. Without You (We Are Everything)
10. Meant To Be
11. Michael
Album length:
