ALBUM REVIEW: In Cinemascope With Stereophonic Sound – The Seafloor Cinema
With the emo revival marching into the rawring 20s, some of the genre’s favourite bands have blasted back onto the scene with new releases, warming the spirit of the 30-something year-old adult emo kid. Sacramento foursome THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA have combined some of this nostalgic sound with their previous sounds for second album, In Cinemascope With Stereophonic Sound.
The album opens with Adjusting Expectations, a song that instantly takes the listener back to the glory of the 00s with its pop-punk, happy-go-lucky bop and lyrics reminiscing of many ALL TIME LOW tracks. While it is nice to be taken straight back into the dingy rock club with £10 all-you-can-drink cups, jumping around to this type of music, there is a lack of musicality and guitar riffs in this opener which was promised. This continues into the next track, Glimmer, although this time with much more comparison to CUTE IS WHAT WE AIM FOR. The song also brings a hint of emo with the vocals from lead singer Justin Murray which transverse across the octaves for a depth missing from the first track.
As the record progresses, there’s a welcome change of pace with May as the band crack open their acoustic guitar cases and harmonise vocals from the start. Perhaps it’s a negative serenade, or maybe it’s just a song to make themselves feel better about the girl they like not paying them attention – either way, while the song may have an essence of a DASHBOARD CONFESSIONAL ballad, it can’t escape the sarcastic and negative intentions of a song that feels like it’s being sung through seething teeth in a teenager’s bedroom.
1000 Ways To Say You’re Okay Every Day brings back some of that math rock magic seen in previous release Find Yourself. With the technical guitar riffs behind the pop-punk-meets-emo voices it shows you what the quartet are really capable of musically and drags you in with curiosity from the listener and confidence from the band pulling on your ear. The only downside to this track is that they don’t utilise the complicated guitar riffs intrinsically woven throughout the track beneath the vocals and give them their own showcase in the bridge or to take the spotlight after choruses into the verses, the way masters of math rock STRAWBERRY GIRLS might have done.
Drip God, one of the band’s single releases, comes next. If you had not heard this track prior to this album, you’d believe it was a filler or intermission-type song. The use of vocal synthesizers is their only appearance across the album and it sports repetitive vocals with no recognised verse-chorus song structure. Having said that, it shows another depth to the seafloor the band have played with and continues that curiosity as to why they have not utilised it before? Can Someone Please Draw Me a Map to Serotonin follows, and this is arguably the album’s strongest track in the style they have adopted for this release. It mixes influences across genres as well as having an 80s sound hidden beneath the modern clean SILVERSTEIN-esque vocal lines.
The album ends with latest single Tap Tapply, a song which bleeds COHEED AND CAMBRIA and nostalgia, which the band themselves were aiming for by describing it as an anthem for those seeking “an alternative rite of passage by finding fulfilment in heartbreak and nostalgia”. Unfortunately this falls a little flat. Like the rest of the album, it fails to provide the difference 00s emo and pop-punk kids will be looking for as their playlists are already full with all the bands THE SEAFLOOR CINEMA have been compared to in this release.
Rating: 6/10
In Cinemascope With Stereophonic Sound is out now via Pure Noise Records.
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