Flyleaf - Momento Mori
This is mushy pop-rock with an edge, but it certainly ain’t all that bad.
Twelve seconds into album opener ‘Beautiful Bride’ and it’s already nigh-on impossible not to compare Flyleaf to Paramore. The sugar-sweet yet angsty female vocals here immediately connote Dame Hayley Williams, which may do their originality some harm but their commercial appeal no trouble whatsoever.
The promotional guff stickered onto the front of ‘Memento Mori’ informs us in a shouty voice that this is the follow up to their platinum selling debut album, and you can tell why they’re already sold buckets.
This is mushy pop-rock with an edge, but it certainly ain’t all that bad. There is a however a lopsided nature to this record, with the first few tracks amongst the best here; ‘Chasm’ showcases some delectable vocal delivery whilst ‘Missing’ injects some much needed variation into the guitar playing, making for a transfixing chorus hook.
It derails as it reaches its conclusion, with a lot of middle-of-the-round mediocrity punched into many of the latter tracks. ‘Set Apart This Dream’ is a numbing trudge through verse/chorus/verse/chorus cheese and back, whilst the spoken word intro to ‘Treasure’ is mouth-creasingly cringing (‘That night I felt like I’d become something treasured’).
Finale ‘Arise’ isn’t quite the send-off we’re hoping for, wading deep into the generic kingdom of saccharine verses and plunging, splashy flighted choruses. It’s a damning summary of this album, which, despite some nifty flourishes, bows down to lord of listless predictability a little too often. Round one to Paramore then.
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