You don’t often see a six piece guitar band; even less so a band with two members whose sole responsibility is singing. But, it worked for Sam and Dave, so let’s move on, because the listen here isn’t unpleasant. Although the topics alternate between the oft-trodden themes of love, parties and how their lives are pretty wild, A Failed Apology don’t waste words, showing a clear mind for brevity; a trait that lots of others bands could do with learning. This approach isn’t entirely mirrored in the songwriting; each of these songs are probably a chorus too long.
An initial question would be what their aim is for this piece of work is. They’ve got the guitar melodies, the cookie monster doing the backing vocals, a hopeful beat-down, and the incredibly poppy chorus. It can be assumed that the chorus is supposed to be the pinnacle of each song (makes sense, right?), but actually the significant parts when they occur, are the Killswitch Engage style shout from James McQuade. On occasions, rather than overloading the guitars, they’ve backed these sections with what sounds like a synth, or a synthy guitar, and that sounds much more punchy, and significant than anything else on the first half of the record. Alas, this type of section is completely outnumbered by choruses that use words like “sexy” and “rugby party”, and the duet between the growler and the crooner doesn’t work at all. The standout section in the middle of the LP is the first 4 bar shout, and shouty mid 8 bars of ‘Starbury ’95 Classic’, but A Failed Apology slip too readily back to an 8 beat and the plod of radio friendly pop punk.
I know that New Found Glory were an interesting concept because Chad Gilbert had been in Shai Hulud and then they went and made jolly old pop records, but that band realised that pop melodies worked best on their own, and hardcore breakdowns similarly achieved the bigger impact in their own field. A Failed Apology would benefit massively from realising the same, and choosing one path or another, and working on bringing the concept of their band to fruition. The penultimate track ‘Goodbye’ is just played on acoustic guitar, and has a really excellent Dashboard Confessional swing to it. There’s also no posturing; they just convey an emotion very nicely, and the final track ‘The Weekend’ carries this on to end the LP on a much higher note than it had previously achieved. The subtle difference seems to be that those two songs appear to mean something to the songwriter, and so much more care and attention was put into those 6 minutes. That subtlety helps the music make a very significant leap. Mark Twain famously told us to “write what you know”, and he did pretty well for himself.
JON CURTIS