THE EARLY NOVEMBER - The Acoustic Ep

The Early November are a recently formed American quintet with just one LP behind them, "Room's Too Cold" from 2003, and an EP, "For All of This" from 2002, in which they serve up a predictable blend of pop, punk and emo. This "Acoustic EP", which has actually been circulating online for two years now, simply revisits a handful of tracks from their back catalogue (almost all taken from the previous EP, which is also echoed on this release's cover art) in acoustic form.

Truth be told, there's very little to describe. The opening track, "Ever So Sweet", is the band's big number. It's a simple, harmonious Dawson's Creek-style melody, structured and sung with heartfelt urgency and steeped in teenage angst, the vocals shifting between falsetto (Chris Martin) and shouted delivery (Will Sheff), the perfect soundtrack for aching young love. It still deserves a passing grade, though, for being catchy, well judged and sincere.

Unfortunately, what follows (and that's pretty much the whole record) is just a formless mass. The bare-bones structure, with virtually no arrangement to speak of (just a hint of percussion on a couple of tracks), doesn't help matters at all - if anything, it lays bare the fact that these songs are nothing more than half-sketched melodic lines, with no depth whatsoever, no beginning and no end. "I Want to Hear You Sad" is an exercise in pure pointlessness; "All We Ever Needed" reaches for just enough syrupy romance to hook its intended slice of the audience; "Sunday Drive" starts out tender and understated before building to an emo... zzzzzz... tional and despe... uaaaaah... rate crescendo.

Perhaps the only track that attempts to recapture the magic of the opener is "Make It Happen", though it settles for sounding exactly as expected, so much so that it comes across as fake, rubbery, leaving behind nothing but piles of coldness and boredom. Before closing the file on this one, there's only one conclusion to draw: for Enders' band (he's the band's songwriter), there's still a long way to go - maybe too long.

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30/04/2026