Artist: Bel Auburn
Album: Cathedrals
Label: The Damselfly
Tracks: 10
Length: 54:02
Review by: Mike “R.I.P. R.S.C.” Leech

This is an album full of promising beginnings and disappointing conclusions. Like a middling, second-rate mixture of Coldplay and Mineral (heavy on the Mineral), Bel Auburn have no problem constructing songs that are “pretty” and “nice” but can rarely figure out where to go from there. The album opens relatively strong with “The Speed of Thought”. It’s got a pretty typical “attention getter” melody, but the ultra catchy chorus vocal is what really sets the song apart. “How Not to Get Caught” also boasts an excellent vocal hook but yet another cliche melody comes along with it.

“Bright” is an example of one of those “disappointing conclusions” I talked about. Those first two songs I mentioned kind of got me thinking this album might be a little something more than cookie-cutter emo rock, but then “Bright” came along and convinced me otherwise. The song starts out with some muffled acoustic strumming recorded in mono for a couple measures before “bursting” into full-band stereo -- probably one of the oldest and most played tricks in the book. The whole song, in fact, seems to have been borrowed from that same book. All of its chord changes, drum beats and bass lines have been played out a million times before. The song eventually attempts to drag itself out of tedium by building to a noisy, climactic ending, but pounding the crash cymbal and strumming a little faster makes the conclusion sound much more awkward than dynamic.

The rest of the album follows a similar pattern -- a somewhat good song followed by a painfully mediocre one. “Hands, Away” is easily the best track on the record. It’s got a perfectly fitting beat, a sweet haunting trumpet line and a lazy but enveloping guitar hook. It’s a shame that such an excellent song should also be followed up by such a cheesy, forgettable one like “Polestar”... another unfortunate disappointment. But at least by that point you’re already half-expecting it. This album is so close to being good that it hurts.