Album Reviews

Bone & Marrow
5.5
 on
Thursday, May 2, 2013 - 20:36
submitted by
Thomas

Defeater has been a hardcore band on the rise for the last couple of years and while they show no signs of slowing down anytime soon, Defeater vocalist Derek Archambault felt the time was right to launch an acoustic solo project under the Alcoa moniker.

“Bone & Marrow” comes with eleven softly strummed songs that have an Americana vibe going on. A couple of them are equipped with a full band backing Archambault (“Limbs”, “Rilke”), others are stripped all the way down. And while I admire the guy for daring to leave the loud guitars behind, the songs on “Bone & Marrow” sound like they were written by someone who has a very fixed idea of what these kind of songs should sound like. And so you get eleven songs that sound very alike and tend to get kinda whiney. The fact that he sings in the most monotonous voice I’ve heard in quite some time doesn’t exactly help things along.

I read other reviews where Alcoa was compared to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen which says absolutely nothing about this album. It just proves that those guys know next to nothing about singer/songwriters. It has more in common with Josh Ritter’s earlier work… it’s just not as good.
 

Tom Dumarey
Tom Dumarey

Lacking the talent to actually play in a band, Tom decided he would write about bands instead. Turns out his writing skills are mediocre at best as well.