Flyleaf - Flyleaf Review
by Dan Upton
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Loose bass riff, airy vocals, and then crashing guitars. So opens the debut from Texas's Flyleaf, a 5-piece hard rock/alterna-metal group fronted by a female vocalist. Now before you run off, don't worry, they're not just a group trying to cash in on the rock-with-a-female-vocalist thing that Evanescence brought about. They do, however, share some of the same success in the Christian music community that Evanescence did, courtesy "Cassie," a reference to Cassie Bernall who was killed at Columbine for professing belief in God.If you take the music without Lacey Mosley's vocals, there isn't a whole lot that helps them stand out from the rest of the crowd--it's a lot of the same style of drop-tuned riffs that you've heard from every other band on the radio. They do explore more with textures than some of their contemporaries, such as the under-produced raw tone of the opening bass riff (similar in sound to the opening riff of Rage Against the Machine's "Tire Me") or the fuzziness of the verse riff on "Cassie." Certainly their biggest chance of standing out lies in Lacey, however, whose vocal lines range from the light ethereal tone of the opening lines to screams that are somewhere in between emocore and European melodic metal. The biggest disappointment in the vocal department is probably the chorus to the opener "I'm So Sick," which seems like a stretched attempt at writing a hook and is a little too influenced by recent female singer-songwriters like Michelle Branch. The worst thing about this CD by far is the length, or more specifically the lack thereof--there are only 10 tracks, 7 of which clock in at 3 minutes or less. The closer "So I Thought," also the longest song, is more of a ballad that breaks away from the riff rehashing and shows some ability for songwriting. There's nothing terribly new or exciting on this disc, but if you're a fan of the harder stuff that still gets played on mainstream rock radio then there's definitely some enjoyment to be had here.
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Flyleaf - Flyleaf Label:Octone Records Rating:
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