reviews / 2008

ABLE BAKER FOX - Voices

Name: ABLE BAKER FOX – Voices
Item: Voices
Rating: 6
Author: Francesco Nunziata

2008 (Second Nature)

alt-rock, emocore

by Francesco Nunziata

“Voices” is the debut album by Able Baker Fox (a quartet featuring members of Small Brown Bike, The Casket Lottery and Coalesce), yet another piece in the mosaic of American emocore.

Skilled at letting rawness detonate into sudden, catchy melodies (the opening “October” is a prime example), Nathan Ellis, Mike Reed, Ben Reed and Jeff Gensterblum nonetheless show more craft than genuine inspiration, delivering eleven tracks that scrape a passing grade without much fanfare.

An average record, in short, that won’t disappoint fans of the genre, who will certainly feel at home with tracks like “Folding Pocket Blades”, “Dead Space”, “Brand New Moses” and “Whispering”, all brimming with that youthful emphasis that speaks of nothing but its now well-worn idiosyncrasy for raw, naked visceralness.

More interesting are the push and pull of “Stuttering”, the vintage-tinged post-punk dynamics of “Palindramatics”, the deft panoramic architecture of “What Doesn't Kill You”, the restrained ascent of “Blind Writer” and the sing-along chorus of “Whispering”. And if in “Twenty Centuries” we seem to catch a hint of Silkworm, perhaps that's just professional bias on our part… It would, after all, be asking too much of a band that still has a long way to go.

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31/12/2007

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Francesco Nunziata, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition