wax&wires

Wax Pick: Paper Route – Absence

Say hello to one of your favorite albums of 2009. Absence is the much anticipated debut from Nashville’s Paper Route. I first wrote about them a while back in recommending their EP, Are We All Forgotten.

Absence takes all the best pieces from Paper Route’s EP, consolidates them onto a full length, and sharpens the band’s identity even more. It’s very easy to overproduce music in thier genre, adding too many layers, swallowing the vocal, forsaking the emotion that ought to be driving the music in the first place. However, Paper Route found a great balance between layered textures of synths and guitars, while still keeping the lyrics and melody as the driving force of the album. You still walk away singing the vocal, rather than the guitar lick and there’s not one song on the album that feels like a “filler.”

The album opens with “Enemy Among Us,” a haunting track that transports you into the landscape of the album, especially if you’ve got a good set of headphones on. It warms you up for the push of more uptempo songs to come, and pulls you in with heartfelt lyrics.

Tracks like “Good Intentions” take me back to the 90s with the strong pad and filtered drums in the background. The falsetto vocal hook is remeniscent of Tears For Fears era pop, but definitely given a more modern spin.

My favorite song on the album is easily “Be Healed.” Cue the return of falsetto hooks with a reverb saturated guitar and pulsing synth, and now imagine them playing in a tub of molasses as the song leans back on a great half-time groove. It seriously sounds like if Richard Ashcroft were to step in to cut a track with Kings of Leon, which is not bad company if you ask me.

For more info on Paper Route’s upcoming tour, as well as some exclusive content, click here.

Paper Route – Absence

This entry was posted on Thursday, April 30th, 2009 at 10:51 am. It is filed under wax picks and tagged with electronic, rock, synth. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.