Greenville Scene

Today We Escape
. . . I’ve Made a Huge Mistake
5/10

by Keith Groover

The first thing that really caught my ear on this album occurs about halfway through the song Inexplicable Change of Heart. It’s a really cool breakdown where everything stops and there’s a dull hiss that gets louder and louder, then it’s capped off by some quick hits by the band. Then it happens again. And again. And again and again. Then the song comes back. It’s a cool moment, but there’s one very large flaw; it occurs almost thirty minutes into this overly long and under-cooked album.

This isn’t to say that there isn’t some good stuff here, but rather that there’s often too much good stuff. There’s so much music to wade through that it’s hard to separate the really good from the okay. A song that would be perfectly fine taken by itself, such as Die Right Here, ends up getting lost in the shuffle of the relentless and headache-inducing one-chord wonders of its surrounding songs.

I imagine that the band is unwilling or unable to differentiate between the sheep and the goats in its set list. By the time the last track The Ultimate Aphrodisiac finally grinds to a halt (over half of the song is the “ending”), the album seems to have dipped into self-parody.

However, if you’re willing to overlook the fatal flaw of length (the album contains over an hour of music spread across fifteen tracks), you can find some pretty interesting music and some thoughtful, if often pretentious, lyrics. Today We Escape consists of two guitarists, one of whom is also the singer and songwriter of the band, a drummer and a bass player. The sound is loud, heavy, and low, while the vocals mostly stay in the higher register. The music is riffy and grungy and generally follows a poppy verse-chorus structure, and the band is at its best when it occasionally delves into interesting rhythmic territory. Often individual songs hold up better than the album as a whole, due to the fact that many of the songs cover the same general territory and float around the same bass notes throughout. In fact, there were several times when I had to look at my CD player to see if a new riff was a new song or just a new section of the same song.

The sad thing is that I think there’s enough interesting material here that, with some simple editing and some brutal track culling, this could be a pretty good album or a really good EP. Out of the fifteen tracks, I counted nine that I think were really good songs. As it is, though, it has too much filler that simply takes up too much time. Here’s hoping for a re-release.

http://todayweescape.com
www.myspace.com/xtodayweescapex

We thought that since Vinson & Floyd did such an outstanding job on their Christmas song (which made Sufjan’s top 40), maybe they wouldn’t mind writing a few more holiday songs. Check out their latest offering Happy New Year Darlin’ (What a Blue Year it Has Been). Greenville Scene has challenged Vinson & Floyd to write 8 more holiday songs throughout 2008.  We’ll let you know when the next holiday rolls around.