The Delusionist,
Deciding TonightIf there’s any definable element that can let a band’s sound down it’s a complete lack of originality. You can walk into a pub and listen to some fifteen year olds playing three chords and howling like dying animals, yet be charmed and enthused by their character and passion. But if they were just playing a parody of already hackneyed covers then it wouldn’t be so appealing.
And so to Deciding Tonight, who spend the entirety of The Delusionist trying to sound like a mixture of their favourite bands. This wouldn’t be such a bad thing if they actually pulled it off, and injected a bit of imagination into the formula. But if I had a quid for every band I’ve heard over the past five years who’ve cloned Thursday, Taking Back Sunday and Atreyu and come off a cropper, I’d have just collected a cool 300p.
Every song is just another generic heavy pop rock track that tries to pass itself off as innovative yet use painfully obvious chord progressions and stylistics. Lyrically the whole thing is a mess; on top of the usual ambiguous playground poetics about relationships, sometimes the vocalist just isn’t making any sense. “You wrote the script before you ever had the cast”, he bleats on ‘When It Was a Game’.
No-one in the band puts any personality into the vocals which doesn’t help matters. The use of keyboards and ‘atmospheric’ breakdowns are the bands attempt to add depth to proceedings but predictably these don’t amount to anything interesting. Final track ‘The End of an Error’ (aptly put) shamelessly rips a Geoff Rickly style calm-before-the-storm bridge, but with none of the same panache.
It’s hard work finding anything to praise here. ‘The Science of Dowsing’ has an understated honesty about it, and that’s grasping at straws. The only advice I can give is that it’s cooler to copy Fall Out Boy these days.
www.decidingtonight.com
Alex
