December 6th, 2011 
James Shotwell 
Artist: Fake Figures
Album: Hail The Sycophants
Genre: Rock
Label: Shillen Records
Apparently, all the bands from my childhood have chosen now to resurface. The most recent band that showed up out of nowhere was Atreyu, a band which I was a huge fan of back in the days when wearing blazers and eye-liner in a music video was a cool thing to do, but sort of faded off my radar since then. To be perfectly honest, I haven’t really devoted much attention at all to Atreyu since maybe 2006, at the latest. I didn’t even hear about the hiatus that they announced earlier this year. Either way, here we are, at the tail end of 2011, and they’ve shown up again, and I actually caught the news this time. This time though, it took the form of a new band, Fake Figures, featuring ex-Atreyu guitarist Travis Miguel, as well as members of other similar fallen bands. Now, I’m always skeptical of all “supergroups”, so to speak, especially those that were just put together because all their old bands simply broke up, or faded into irrelevance. It’s very rare that one of these types of bands can pull off their sound without feeling like they’re half-assing things at least a little bit. The only ones that come to mind that ever actually work, usually involve Craig Owens somehow, for whatever reason, and unfortunately for Fake Figures, he isn’t in the band, so as far as I was concerned, the odds were against them for their debut EP, Hail The Sycophants.
While it may sound like I just wrote this album off before I even gave it a chance, I’m merely speaking from experience. Typically, when a new band is formed out of the ashes of several different bands that were the former livelihood of these musicians, the new project tends to sound just a bit too unorganized. Most of those sorts of bands lack some sort of cohesive and singular vision, instead falling into the trap of letting the individual styles they’ve become so comfortable with over the years take control, and limit the final product of their new band. And unfortunately, this is precisely the feeling I get from Fake Figures; when broken down to it’s most basic elements, the songs aren’t bad, but songs aren’t meant to be broken down that far, they are intended to be taken as a whole, as the end result of what each part of the band had to offer, and this time, it just came out too jumbled. I could never quite figure out the exact vision and style they were going for throughout the album. Hail The Sycophants seemed more like an attempt at too many different styles at once. It definitely had it’s shining moments though, the intro to “Something Deadly” was fantastic, but the song lost it’s drive rather quickly. And the rest of the album suffered the same sort of fate, once they got onto something good, the next idea took over just a bit too quickly.
I’m all for playing music, I never see why someone should just straight up quit. Sure, life gets in the way sometimes, bands drift apart, people get married, have kids, get a ‘real’ job; I understand. But that doesn’t mean those people need to give up, it’s not hard to find a couple minutes of downtime a week to pick up an instrument, and have some fun. But sometimes, the transition from professional musician to hobbyist doesn’t quite go very smoothly, some people just miss the signals. And at least for me, that’s what happened with Fake Figures, their old bands broke up, and I can see why they don’t want the glory days to end, and while I wouldn’t consider Fake Figures to be a bad band, just not any of the members finest work. And if this is merely an outlet to continue to play music, then the more power to them, but being presented as much more might be a bit ambitious.
SCORE 6/10
Reviewed by: Mike Hogan
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