7/10
Favorite Track: "You Used to Say (Holy Fuck)" Least Favorite Track: "Trampoline"
You’re riding home from school on the bus one day and your best friend hands you an earbud. Reserved yet intrigued, you listen. The voice you hear is performing a mixture of croons, whines, and belts yet somehow still sounds like a top-notch vocalist. In the real world that voice is Brian Sella of the New Jersey based indie folk band: The Front Bottoms. Trust me when I explain to you that The Front Bottoms are not for everyone. The majority of their output features a genre-bending and unique sound that many have trouble getting into. I, on the other hand am a sucker for unique voices, thus I fell in love with Sella’s. To this day their 2015 project Back On Top, stands as one of my favorite indie albums of all time and despite it being my favorite, I hold every other release in their catalog in high regard. With this being said however, I do think their 2017 release, Going Grey, is by far their least compelling. For me, Back on Top felt like the furthest they could push their sound. With the follow-up, I was hoping that the band would keep their edge but direct it somewhere new and exciting. The project did find a new angle like I predicted, but it wasn’t a transition I enjoyed. Going Grey finds itself pulling from the same places that The Front Bottoms usually do, but this time around they decided to eliminate the acoustic-driven ideas that made their self titled so interesting, and the engaging song-writing that made Back on Top so great, and replace it with a more pop influenced and commercial take on their sound. The TFB blueprints are still there but Going Grey sounds like what would happen if Brian Sella began writing for Imagine Dragons or Owl City. To put it blunt, I mainly enjoy this album for it’s familiar, unique, and always emotional vocals. I think it would be hard for me to dislike an album from The Front Bottoms unless Sella lost his vocal chords. TFB’s songwriting edge is still present here but it is buried under their conformity to commercialism. Going Grey isn’t nearly as interesting as the strange and quirky mix of folk, emo, and rock that put this outfit on the map and quite honestly I would rather just listen to Back On Top.