REVIEW: Living With Lions – Some Of My Friends Appear Dead To Me

June 25th, 2013

Adrian Garza

Artist: Living With Lions
Album: Some Of My Friends Appear Dead To Me
Genre: Pop-Punk
Label: Pure Noise Records

One of the realities of being in a band with other people is knowing that there are always going to be outside factors that will influence your bandmates’ willingness to keep their efforts in at 100%. This is all understandable seeing as how we’re all free-thinking people, but this definitely can dampen a group’s ability to put out the best possible album, which is exactly the case with Living With Lions on their fourth work as a band, Some Of My Friends Appear Dead To Me. You see, a major thing happened since this Canadian pop-punk group released Holy Shit, their 2011 LP… Stu Ross (their second vocalist in five years as a band) left the band to join Comeback Kid.

Rather than filling in the vacant space with new blood, LWL decided that the better route to pursue would be to have guitarist Chase Brenneman step up and sing for the band. It’s been ten months since the band’s made that decision public and what we have here in front of us on this EP are three songs that made the cut, and the results are alright at best.

One of the things that made the group previously stick out to me in the past has been how hard-hitting and rough their songs have always been, and that isn’t completely thrown out the window here, it’s just been changed up to work better with vocals that are more nasally, softer, and higher-pitched. And one of the best examples of that would be one of my favorite parts of the EP, “Between The Lines,” a closer that has all of these simple, driving bass lines, deep lyrics about moving past problems, and guitar lines that really help to accent the emotions being brought out. In theory, all of this is a solid idea, and it’s a plus that there is now a strong resemblance to the early Through Being Cool era of Saves The Day’s career, but listeners aren’t left with much that’s considered to be unique here in 2013. If things were tweaked to have more of a modern twist, we may have a winner on our hands.

Rating: 6.75/10
Reviewed by: Adrian Garza (Twitter)