Brave Bird live up to their namesake indeed, attempting to meld two fairly dissonant musical genres on their debut album Maybe You, No One Else Worth It.
The Michigan three-piece have taken the light, jingle jangly guitar sounds of indie-kid rock bands like Modest Mouse and mashed them up with some whiny punk vocals. It’s a valiant attempt, but the resultant effect is a band sounding not quite sure of what they want to be.
This is confirmed by the opening track “Too Late Now” a curious mix of pop-rock guitar melodies with some shouty, off kilter punk vocals.
“Thick Skin (Should I Give In)” opens quietly with a tapping drum and a gently oscillating guitar riff. The plaintive lyrics, “Coming down/I’m not messing around/I was on the way out/This place don’t belong to me”, and deep bassline could have been the basis of a nice down tempo ballad. Like most of the tracks on the album though, the song’s soft instrumental beginnings are soon swamped by a predictable cascade of wailing, shouting and thundering drums.
“Healthy” treads a slightly different path with some breathy spoken-word sampling. It sounds like French, but it could be Mongolian, for all that can be distinguished under the too-loud instrumentals.
Brave Bird are a competent group of musicians, and with a serious rethink of their vocal styling, the band’s future releases might be stronger than this fledgling debut.
