IAMMEDIC – The Tail Of Abigail Withers

Orange County electo poppers IAMMEDIC suffer from the same faults as labelmates We Are The Arsenal.  There’s a lot of effort in their six track EP, The Tale Of Abigail Withers, but everything gets strangled from the tight grip of obnoxious production values and unnecessary electronics.  Compounding matters, vocalist Enik Lin (assumedly, little information is given regarding roles in the band) gives us a knock out performance that sadly seldom has the chance to really shine above all the gloss and glitter.  Everything else just falls flat in the standard flood of throbbing soundboard beats.

Every track presents a tired verse-chorus-verse structure that typically includes some sort of melancholy verse followed by a nauseating torrent of steady snaps, claps, and vocally twisted electronic emulation.  In fact, every note bleeds into the next, making for nothing more than the occasionally differentiated line.  In my case, I hadn’t even noticed that the second track, “Start Over Again,” had run its course and that the album had moved on to “Cut Me Up.”  The one time they switch their approach ever so slightly in “Unexplained,” Lin sounds like Bowling For Soup’s Jaret Reddick but without the tacky suits and bad jokes – so not a compliment.  When the album ends with “Lose Youself,” it does just that – in other words, the EP has no sense of progression, instead The Tale Of Abigail Withers plays like one big grating mass.

For that matter, who is Abigail Withers?  Looking at the cover art I take it she’s a little goth girl (who looks quite inspired by children’s TV character Ruby Gloom) lost in the faceless corporate grind of daily life.  However, and no point did I ever feet as though anything on the album reached out and made itself known.  Sure, on opener “Don’t Let Go” Lin tries acknowledging society’s deceptive facade in lines like “after the light and glitter are gone,” but coming from a band made of up just that, any sense of breaking free from the norm comes across as bitter sweet irony.

I should say though that to IAMMEDIC’s credit, the band isn’t nearly as annoying as, say, There For Tomorrow (although the fact that they even came to mind is depressing in itself).  That being said, the trio is going to have to do a lot to regroup from this overly commercial dance off, and refocus into something more productive if they’re going to make their mark.