Artist: The Forecast
Album: The Shadow of Two Gunmen
Label: Victory
Tracks: 12
Length: 36:41
Review by: John Durkee

The Forecast mix elements of grunge rock (ala The Foo Fighters), today’s pop punk/emo, an indie rock influence and a small amount of Americana to its overall sound. At its best, The Forecast almost sounds like an indie rock and pop emo influenced Foo Fighters, but rarely gets close. Their sound is built as a four piece with vocals done predominantly by guitarist Dustin Addis, but also features the pipes of bassist Shannon Burns.

The idea to use both male and female vocals for the style of rock The Forecast does is really good and relatively rare in music today. The problem with this is that Addis, while decent, often ends up flat (particularly when holding out notes), but it should be noted that Addis still has enjoyable voice that hardly ruins any song on the album. The real vocal problem on the album is Burns sharp and bombastic vocals. Burns rarely is in tune on the album and tends to only sing in three volume levels: loud, louder and loudest (although she is able to control herself on “You’re My Needle”). Burns sharp vocals tends to clash with Addis on a few songs particularly since he has a tendency to go flat, making him seem like a worse singer than he really is.

The Shadow of Two Gunmen is saturated with poor vocals and a lack of dynamics. The exceptions to this are “Some Things Never Change,” an acoustic ballad with western tones that builds to a jam at the end, and the aforementioned “You’re My Needle” which is another reserved ballad (the only type of song Burns can handle singing “softly” on). “Welcome Home” is a pretty cool song as well, basically about the day to day life of a touring band that contains mostly spoken word on the subject and ranges from poems to the humor of how music saturated the touring life is.

Other songs contain good elements here and there like The Shadow’s opener, “Everything We Want to Be,” which to no surprise is one of the better songs because it contains no vocals by Shannon Burns. “One Hundred Percent” has a catchy chorus, even if it is annoyingly done by Burns.

Basically, if you’re ok with out of tune singing, like anthemic rock songs with layered vocals then this is a decent enough record. Even with all the albums faults I almost want to like it because for the most part the songs are good, they’re just executed at a level too poor to consistently enjoy. Much of the songs blend together and the album loses gusto with further listens. The Forecast still has pretty good potential and I wouldn’t be surprised if they were capable of a great live show despite this mediocre recording.