Day At The Fair – The Rocking Chair Years

Rushmore Records started off on a bad foot with me. Their first two releases, EPs from Self Against City and The Track Record, were lackluster and unmotivated. A very bad start for a young label, even if it is the sister label of one of the biggest pop-punk labels around Drive-Thru Records. So here it is: the label’s third release and first full length. But the question lingers, will it fail like the first two? Or will it be able to kick the label into full swing? Well, as soon as the fifty second piano ballad, The Rocking Chair Years, starts playing you know the answer is the later of the two questions.

The Rocking Chair Years, Day At The Fair‘s debut full length, doesn’t do anything spectacular, but what they do – they do it right. The first thing you notice is Chris Barker’s slightly off key vocals. His vocals are a breath of fresh air in a overly produced scene because you know, what you hear is truly his vocals. Like I said, they are off key. They aren’t perfectly melodic or smoothed out way too much, rather you get straight forward vocals that haven’t seen tons of work done to them. At times, they feel a bit too whiny, but those times are few and far between.

The emo-pop band has a few various melodies played throughout the album, making it so the album doesn’t stay flat and on the same course the entire time. There’s the slow piano ballads like The Rocking Chair Years and Monday Morning, the more upbeat melodies of And My Name’s Dignan, So What?, the very Hidden In Plain View-esque Eastern Homes & Western Hearts, the slower The Lost, The Lucky along with the incredibly infectious and standout track Erasing Wilkes. This last song’s chorus is so catchy you can’t help but replay the song over and over again.

Day At The Fair isn’t anything you haven’t heard before, but its still a good CD. It fits right into the Drive-Thru catalogue with some similarities to bands like The Early November, Something Corporate and Hidden In Plain View. The worst part about the CD is the font they used for the lyrics in the booklet. It is small and blurry and hard to see. But when the worst thing about a CD is the booklet, then you don’t really need to worry about much do you?