Numbers & Figures – The Parable Of The Broken Window

Toronto is a mecca of up and coming musicians and bands. Everywhere you look there’s a new band trying to break through, sometimes those bands can be amazing and become you’re new favorite act while other times they can be painfully dull and forgettable. It’s the same thing that happens in any thriving community: some great bands along with some not so great band. Numbers & Figures, coming out of the suburbs of Toronto, fall somewhere in the middle of the spectrum because even though they aren’t great, they aren’t horrible either.

Pleasant indie pop, The Parable Of The Broken Window is just that – a rather pleasant listen – and nothing more. The album is enjoyable but fails to really escape the boundaries of background music for the most part. Each song follows the same general pattern of distorted guitars, slightly high pitch vocals and an upbeat attitude which doesn’t necessarily make them sound repetitive but makes the songs somewhat generic within the album. The fact that there’s two instrumentals on the ten track record doesn’t help kick you out of that faze either as they would’ve been better using that time for a song with vocals; particularly on the introduction which doesn’t really lead you into the album but feels more like dead weight than anything else.

Of course, that’s not saying that all ten songs just fade into the background because if it did then Numbers & Figures would’ve been placed in the horrible category rather than the middle of the road. No, they do have a few songs that really pull the listener out of the lull of the album. Those songs, mainly I Am Not Afraid Of The Monsters Living Under My Bed and I Found My Tricycle, are able to kick the album up a notch and make it a bit more memorable. Still following the same indie pop structure, those few songs are all tinged with some slight variations that make them stand out. The sing along verse ofMonsters and Our Eyes, Our Feet or the joyful innocence in the vocal delivery of Tricycle show that Numbers & Figures do have the ingenuity to create a song catchy, unique and enjoyable – they just need to bring that creativeness to the rest of the album as well.

Another slight down point of the album is the recording quality as it doesn’t quite feature that polish quality that an indie pop sound like this needs. It just sounds like an independent recording as it isn’t as sharp as it could be and the vocals have this sort of airy tinge to them that could be approved upon. Still, The Parable of The Broken Window is just as I started earlier: pleasant indie pop. It does fall into the background at times – Light and Sunnybrae being the biggest perpetrator of that – but a few songs do really pull the listener in too. Until they are able to make all the songs stand out, Numbers & Figures will just stay in the middle of the pack.