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Earshot’s third album sounds distant

Earshot has a new label (in De Goot) and is looking to see if their third release, The Silver Lining, will make the band a household name and welcome them back to the Top 100 charts. The band had a #4 hit with “Get Away” from their first album Letting Go (2002) and a #9 hit with “Wait” from their second disc, the creatively entitled Two (2004).

The Silver Lining begins with “Closer,” a song that sounds like they are attempting to imitate Tool. They get away from that sound just a little with “Don’t Hate Me” and the more radio friendly sounding “MisSunderstood.” Their website is under construction at the time of this writing, but “MisSunderstood plays on the page while showing a link to their myspace page, so I’m assuming that this may be the first single from the new disc.

There are a lot of nice, crunchy guitars on the album. Nothing technically or proficiently amazing as far as musicality or vocals goes, but the disc isn’t bad. “I Hate You” is a good example of the crunch factor. But for whatever reason, the processing and FX used on Wil Martin’s vocals drop the decibel level in the mix and make the lyrics a little difficult to hear compared to some of the other songs.

The same thing happens with “More Than I Ever Wanted.” The song really revs up and blasts off, but during the chorus, the instruments compete with the vocals.

This happens occasionally on a few more of the 11 songs. Which brings up the fact that the album is only 43 minutes long. 4 years since the last album and the band can only come up with this slim amount of material to fill a disc that will hold over 70 minutes of music?

The Silver Lining might be something that completists or major fans of the band might want when it comes out (Aug. 26, 2008), but I really do hope the advance copy that was sent to me wasn’t a final mix.

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