DECEMBER 2008 ONLINE EDITORIALS

11 Sounds Better - EP

album cover

By Nathan Harper

It’s a question as old as the music itself – do you have to have the blues in order to play them? Well, if you sing on a rap album, it’s not rap, and if you’re an alto singing in the three tenors, conflicts could arise. So what do you say when a man singing about how his baby doesn’t love him actually sounds like he just left her house with a dozen freshly baked cookies? He doesn’t sound blue, or even like he’s keeping his expectations low so as to not set himself up for disappointment, which is all just a way of saying that musically 11 Sounds Better – Spinal Tap reference? – have decent chops, but when vocalist Evan Forgue gets on the mic, he might do better to spin a tale of his woman treating him right.

Each member of the trio claims a different background – Forgue from blues; drummer Jeff Blayney rock and metal, and bassist John Russell a reggae heritage – and while they do make good on their claim that the listener can tell their songs apart, they stay mostly within the confines of Hendrix inspired blues rock. There’s nothing too outside the norm here to make you think they’re working on some sort of hybrid reggae metal/project for next time, except for one bit of rapping which felt shoe-horned in. Overall the EP is a competent and listenable, and represents them well for a first time out, but a little more heartache would make things more convincing.
www.myspace.com/11soundsbetter