They had a good idea: moody pop/rock with a male and a female vocalist trading shots. They had the right producers, culled from the ranks of The Choir and The Throes. Throw in some good songs and some reasonable musicianship, and what do you have? If you're Sunday Blue on your debut album, you have some scattered success, but somehow the whole is less than the sum of its parts.
The Blues take dense, bassy modern rock and inject an Edge-like guitar. With Derri Daugherty and Steve Hindalong laying down tracks on half the songs, there's a certain resemblance to The Choir's Circle Slide album. But where Daugherty's cool, confident vocals were a high point of that album, Sunday Blue vocalists Danna and Drue Bachman frequently seem at odds with the musical style of the band. When they sing in counterpoint, as on the opening song's verses, the effect can be rather nice, but their harmonies get muddy. Danna Bachman in particular seems more concerned with singing "properly" than with melding with the music, though when she breaks through this concern on "I'm Listening," it sounds great-probably the album's high point.
Lyrics take on a respectable range of subjects both interpersonal and spiritual. A theological problem mars "Heaven," where Drue Bachman claims that thinking about heaven or hell is "a waste of time" (Christ didn't seem to think so), but he evidently doesn't believe that himself, as the previous song details his hopes for meeting Christ "face to face." "I Cry" is a decent praise song with an REM-ish vocal.
Sunday Blue does show some promise, when they're not repeating the same word ad infinitum (as happens on "Hello"). Everything just sounded a little garbled when they put it together this time around. The songs which worked best were those which were less U2-inflected, and that's probably a good starting point for their next effort. For now, I'd probably have bought some of these as singles, but I'll pass on the whole album.
Other coverage for this album
Salt #26Reviewed by RoadrunnerThis South Carolina band is fronted by bassist Drue & Dana Bachman on guitars, who trade off lead vocals part of the time, backing each other the rest of the time. A Grey Dot debut, Breathe is a mod pop rock experience that goes from intense swirling guitars in "Crying Man" and the title song, where producers Chris Colbert & Derri Daugherty lend a hand in the "extraneous" guitar mayhem. To the…Similar sounding releases
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