SOUNDS & SILENCES

Sounds and Silences is the debut album of A Big Goodbye, a new act that clearly fits in the Art Rock spectrum of music. This is the heavier side of prog, with influences from metal and the occasional sax (which has a bit of a Supertramp vibe to the way it is played - very melodic and enhancing the rest of what is going on, as opposed to soloing).

On the note of metal, I actually have my first and biggest complaint about the album - and that is the volume on the opening track, Thinking Out Loud. It starts off with a nice quiet, acoustic bit, before heavy, metallic guitars charge in. The difference between these two volumes can be quite a pain in situations where volume matters, like in bed or on the train. I was in fact listening on the train and had the volume high enough to hear the opening part, and when the electric guitars came in I jumped a bit, it was so loud!

Other than that, which honestly was probably more my fault than the bands, this is a pretty good album. For sure, for a fan of progressive music, there are seven good songs in here to add to their music collection. The band makes quite a fair amount of acoustic/quiet and electric/loud to provide variety within their music, and it works for the most part, although by the end of the album it's not as surprising.

Standout tracks included February Girl, which has quite a nice feel to it, and the closing "epic", Memories, which pretty much demonstrates everything that the band does very nicely. It starts off loud, quiets down in the middle, and builds to a nice piano part at the end. The track of course deals with attempting to move forward instead of being held back by memories, a nice theme for the band to cut their teeth on.

Ultimately this album demonstrates a band at the start of their development who have the potential to go further and the chops to take them there. I would like to see a bit more variety in the compositions, but at the same time, the band never bores with this disc.

Enjoy!