Band: The Feverfew

Album: Apparitions

Label: Eyeball Records

Tracks: 9

Anyone that reviews music knows sometimes (yes sometimes) it sucks to have to be the bad guy. 

Singer-Songwriter Bethany Spiers who is basically the sole member of ‘The Feverfew’ has a very sweet, delicate, innocent voice.  Unfortunately, as sweet as her voice is, it can’t make up for the major pitch problems on this album.  Unfortunately, those pitch problems are so major, I had a hard time listening to ‘Apparitions’.  For me, bad pitch is like nails squealing on a chalkboard. 

Bad pitch happens to everyone.  As a singer in the studio recording, sometimes it’s hard to know if you’re totally on.  That’s when you hopefully rely on your producer/engineer to guide you.  I’m not sure what happened here, but I really feel if the vocal pitch was corrected I would have enjoyed the album rather than have been wincing constantly.  Maybe some won’t notice, but it’s all I could notice.

Maybe time or budget didn’t allow the correction—or maybe Spiers just has bad pitch.  With something like pitch though, you have to allow it to be fixed or it will ruin an album—which is what happened in this case. 

With most singer songwriters, female especially, vocals are pushed way up in a mix.  The drawback to this is when there are vocal mistakes—tone and pitch especially.  Maybe tucking the vocals in a little more would have helped as well.  Spiers is a talented guitarist—but the guitars end up unnoticeable because of the vocals.

I wanted to like this album.  I hope future endeavors for Ms. Spiers end up much better than this release.  I hope my review is seen as what it was meant to be—constructive criticism, not unkindness.