Memphis May Fire are a young Texan band with a good few tricks up their sleeve. They produce music which falls happily into the genre of Post-Hardcore, containing elements of more straight up rock in their sound also. Released in late January through Trustkill Records, their self titled EP contains five tracks that when I first listened to I couldn’t make my mind up as to whether I liked them or not.
The band begin the EP with ‘Cowbell’s Makin’ a Comeback’, a track that unsurprisingly comes complete with cowbells in the sound. As it begins the guitars come through strongly, when the vocals finally make an appearance however they are somewhat of a disappointment. They just don’t contain the same power and energy as the guitars, not a great way to begin life with their EP and certainly not something that impressed me in the slightest. I look for a good opening when I listen to a CD, something this EP certainly can’t boast of having. Whilst it is not immediately attention grabbing, as the track progresses some melodic vocals shine through in which the band sound very much like Coheed and Cambria. I am a huge fan of the vocals of Coheed and Cambria front man Claudio Sanchez and to me this was therefore not a bad thing, I’m sure however that there are plenty out there that will not be so open to listening to such high pitched vocals.
As the band progress through this EP the Claudio Sanchez style vocals continue to shine through, for the most part however they tend to scream their way through this release. Whilst their screaming is at times pretty damn good, there are other times when the screaming sounds extremely weak and doesn’t shine through in the slightest. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just a little too generic for my liking. I’m not a huge fan of the scream-sing-scream formula, it’s been done to death already and I’ve long since tired of hearing it. Memphis May Fire are pretty competent at doing what they do and their music is often quite powerful, their music just doesn’t stand out as being particularly different and they add extremely little to the genre of Post-Hardcore I feel.
‘Therapy Caravan of the Fair Room’ stands out to me quite significantly when I listen to this release. Here the band sound a lot like Every Time I Die in my opinion, a band I am greatly fond of. Again they bring in the Claudio Sanchez vocals at times, but less so than anywhere else on this release. It is a good sound that they produce here and the music is greatly effective, it’s not exactly the most original music in the world but certainly provides for an interesting and entertaining listening experience, that’s for sure.
Whilst in ‘Therapy Caravan of the Fair Room’ the band tend primarily to stick to a more hardcore approach, with final track ‘Conjunctions, Conjunctions, Everybody Loves Them’ they decide they’d much rather favour melody. During this three minute final track they spend two minutes cranking out the melodic vocals before deciding that for the final minute they shall power out the hardcore once more. They end on a light note right at the death of the track, bursting out with one last line of melody, but this final track just sounds a little confused in sound. It’s a track of two halves and does in fact sound like two tracks rather than one. Whilst with most Post-Hardcore bands you can accurately predict the precise second where the band will insert their next scream and know exactly when they will return with a melodic burst, Memphis May Fire are not at all as predictable which is obviously a greatly redeeming quality of their sound.
One problem I have with Memphis May Fire is that in every track on this EP they seem to be trying something different. Obviously this is not necessarily a bad thing and it’s great that they are in fact trying out a variety of different styles on this EP, but to me it just sounds as though the band are yet to find their niche. They know they want to work on the genre of Post-Hardcore, but how heavily they wish to input sounds of Southern Rock and straight up Rock and Roll into their music they seem not yet to know. Their music is fast and often fun, but often they sound a little too generic and contrived for my liking. Rather than working on their own sound, they seem to mimic a number of different bands on this release in order to make up their ‘Memphis May Fire’ EP as a whole.
What I like about this EP is the fact that the band are unafraid of varying the formula and trying out something different. As I’ve already stated however, the flip side of this is that the band seem not to know what sound is ‘their sound’ yet and are yet to discover what they do best. They show that they have plenty of ideas on this EP, but the problem is that the ideas they have tend not to be their own. Whilst Memphis May Fire could turn out to become an excellent band, at the moment they do not have enough ideas of their own to be so and are instead an experimental but really quite unestablished band with much to prove but little originality to offer. The EP provides 19 minutes of decent entertainment, but there will be times on this release when you just feel as though you’ve heard it all before and have in fact heard it done a lot better than this. If you’re a fan of Post-Hardcore then Memphis May Fire should impress, if however you’re looking for something a little different from the norm then this EP probably wont be able to offer you this. Feel free to give this EP a whirl and make up your own opinion, it certainly shouldn’t disappoint but then again it wont exactly set your world alight either.
Label: Trustkill Records
Release Date: 28th January 2008
Rating:
UK based film graduate with a huge passion for music, sports and video games.
