Armor For Sleep – Dream To Make Believe

“Perhaps the most reflective moments of our lives are lives in the minutes before sleep completely drowns out our consciousness. We are forces to face our thoughts and at the same time admit that sleep will soon wash them all away. Armor for Sleep is about capturing these moments.”

The first paragraph on the bio for Armor For Sleep. Catches your attention doesn’t it? It shows juts how important a good biography can be. And it is quite true. Armor For Sleep does capture those few moments in your life. Smooth, melodic music overflows from your speakers as their new CD, Dream To Make Believe, is spinning in your player. The stand out thing though, are the lyrics. They are powerful and meaningful. Like the first line from the opening track, Dream To Make Believe: “It’s funny how things work out, the ones we need don’t know we’re there.”

The tune itself is very soft and melodic. Having a very very soft drum beat, and smooth guitar riffs, the songs by Armor For Sleep are always slow. Something which can be used to cool you down or something nice to listen to as you fall asleep at night. The worst part about this band are the vocals. The founder of the band, Ben Jorgensen sings on the songs. His lyrics are powerful, but his voice is not. It is very monotone and rarely, rarely changes speed or volume. Also, most of the time, the instruments drown them out a bit, which gets annoying after a while.

My favorite track on this CD is track 5, The Wanderers Guild. This has a slightly harder beat to it (but only a bit). The beginning is awesome, a really good bass melody to get your attention. The drumming stylings of Nash Breen are more evident as well. Slightly harder and used more frequently. Lyrically, this song stands up above all. They are about being able to talk about your problems, but not wanting to right away. And just thanks for asking. Really powerful, and true, like most of their lyrics. The final song, Slip Like Space is another really good song which I like. It is a perfect song to end the album with. The vocals are much more evident in this track, which is a good thing to hear finally.

Overall, I do enjoy this CD. But it will get old in my mind fast, and will not be on my top 10 list for sure.  Despite it receiving a lot of publicity, I feel it is just simply a mediocre album. Nothing really stands out at all from it (excluding the lyrics).