No, That's Not It…

[rating: 7.5/10]

I begin this review with a thought that was with me throughout the entire process of taking notes on this album and constructing this piece… a conundrum more than a thought, actually. While something was familiar about More in Sorrow’s sound and they reminded me of music I listened to and loved in my high school and/or college days, I just couldn’t put my finger on it… and still can’t! Something Borrowed, Something Blue is something familiar, something nostalgia inducing… but it is just inches away from my grasp and buried somewhere in my memory.

This album, for starters, is a solid album. One may be turned off if I were to label the sound with a dreadful word like “emo-core” but they shouldn’t be. Like emo-core bands before them, ie. Boy Sets Fire (an all-time favorite of mine), the band is successful in creating emotive indie rock while incorporating elements of hardcore music, pushing the genre label in to some hybrid “-core” genre, turning off hipsters worldwide… but who cares, we don’t need no stinkin’ hipsters!

As a basis of comparison, I assumed at first that More in Sorrow would bear similarities to Michael Signorelli’s other band that I had reviewed some time ago, the85bears. Boy, was I wrong? The mellow beauty of the85bears may have brief moments of comparison on Something Borrowed, Something Blue, but the most important element to More in Sorrow’s music is raw emotion. Powerful lyrics, strained yearning vocals, screams, and pounding drums all set the tone on this post-hardcore/progressive indie/emo-core (take your pick) gem.

On to the actual music (I know that why you came here to begin with, so I’ll get to it)… some other reviewers have compared their sound to Brand New. I can’t endorse this comparison, mostly because I can’t vibe with anything they’ve put out outside of their early output as a fun pop-punk act. Instead, I’ll throw out a few of the names that showed up in my notes and where they came to mind: Harrisburg PA’s Running From Dharma and Stockton CA’s likeDAVID (“Belly Down”), early Taking Back Sunday (“Forked Tongue”), Beloved and From Autumn to Ashes (“Hide and Seek”), Dear Ephesus (“See It Blind”), and Stavesacre (“Wolves”). What does this all mean? Good question.

Often juxtaposing beautiful indie rock with metallic riffs and hardcore breakdowns, the music is technical and sound. The vocals range from dual layered harmonies to strained cries to gut-wrenching screams (very reminiscent to Anguish Unsaid vocalist Michael Hoppé) to pretty falsetto notes. It’s quite obvious that their influences are many and their musical chops are developed. The drumming, especially, demonstrates a technical savvy and emotional tenacity ala Steve Kleisath (Strongarm, Further Seems Forever) that shines through nearly every track.

Good musicianship is something often undervalued in this age of overproduced, auto-tuned Hot Topic metalcore, so it may taking a bit of digging to find your way to the More in Sorrow album, but it’ll be worth it. Raw emotion coupled with well-crafted music is always a winning formula… even if I just can’t put my finger on that band that More in Sorrow’s Something Borrowed, Something Blue reminds me of.

WAIT! It’s early Thursday… no… that’s not it… guess I’ll have to keep listening!

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~ by thepaintedman on April 8, 2010.