The Front Bottoms - In Sickness & In Flames (Review)
The Front Bottoms - In Sickness & In Flames (Review)
9/15/20
DISCLAIMER: This will be this month's last album review. After this, we might have a review of Bill and Ted 3, but anything else (and maybe that) will be discussed in the Fanboy Roundup on the 24th. This mainly depends on more game-related announcements.
The Front Bottoms are a rock band known for combining elements of mainly softer rock and folk, but everything they make is more easily categorized under "indie". With five commercial studio albums and various EPs released since 2007, The Front Bottoms have a well-defined sound, and have grown to work better and better with their style. Expectations going into their latest record "In Sickness & In Flames" were no doubt high, but they certainly had reason to be. In 2018, I felt their improvement was clear especially since their first album. Especially with promising singles like "End of summer", and their EP "Ann". After that, a curiosity of what they could work on next struck along with lots of hype for whatever their next project could be.
When The Front Bottoms put out their first three singles "camoflauge", "everyone blooms", and "montgomery forever", I was very impressed. Perhaps certain parts of certain songs lived up to the better parts of their discography, but "camoflauge" became a new instant favorite of mine. If this album carried good songs with the wide narrative scope an album can offer, this has no right to be anything but great. They released one more single before the album, and on August 21st, the album was out. I found time to listen to it about a week later, and hot damn was I nothing but impressed. Everything sounded like the band embracing their somewhat unique style and very unique vocal tone to their fullest. Pretty much everything sounded improved from older projects from the mix, to the vocal performance, and in quite a few cases the songwriting as well.
Thinking of the bad things, I could only find a handful of relatively minor things about this album. Though, like almost every single piece of art, subjectively bad parts to exist. In this case, the biggest place where the album lacked was its song themes. Here they were as great as ever, but that's precisely the problem. Of course each and every artist and group is subject to their own styles, but when you follow these styles so closely, they can feel a little overused. After my play-throughs of this album, I would go back and compare it to some of The Front Bottoms' older discography, and frankly, some of these songs sounded almost identical. Of course the lyrics and many of the topics were different, but the instrumentals and tone of these songs can very occasionally sound almost indistinguishable. Aside from this one flaw, I had a few minor problems with small bits of the songwriting, but that just about covers it.
Despite certain songs sounding the same as other certain songs by The Front Bottoms, this album is an all-around piece of indie greatness. If you can look past this one flaw, (mind you, this is very easy considering how good every single song still is), then you will find enjoyment in this album in the least. This album would be most obviously recommended to any fan of indie, fans of modern singer-songwriter folk music if you're open to a twist, and most definitely any fan of The Front Bottoms. My favorite track is probably "the hard way". I absolutely adore the songwriting, and the instrumentals sounds like a cover of the perfect Oasis song. Dynamically, this is something that feels like a nice, grand adventure of sound and experience, which is just too easy to appreciate, especially in our current musical climate. My least favorite track is "leaf pile". Honestly, this isn't for a very particular reason, it was just the track I disliked overall the most. Though, every single song on this album holds up to a strict standard of quality set by the artists, which makes them all just about even and all great. Giving this album a 1-10 using half numbers, I give this album an 8/10 with the five-word description of: "indie almost at its finest".
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