The Outline – You Smash It, We’ll Build Around It

When I first got this CD, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Fearless Records has its ups and downs, some bands that I love while others I detest – so the label gave me no real incentive. The name was pretty cool, not The Outline, but You Smash It, We’ll Build Around It struck a chord with me somehow, so I was pretty excited. Sadly, when I opened the booklet to look at the artwork and lyrics, I was appalled – it really was quite a bad booklet. There’s a few pages just sitting there, completely useless, with orangey, wiggly lines floating across it. They could have easily plastered the lyrics for the twelve tracks, but they choose to leave the pages blank instead. It just seemed like a massive waste, and I was disappointed and the album immediately had a black smear on it. But I’ve learnt from past mistakes and I know I can never judge a CD by its cover *cough*Set Your Goals*cough*, so I threw it in; but still, I wasn’t that amazed.

You Smash It, We’ll Build Around It is a fairly lackluster CD. It has a few good songs, but nothing that really jumps out at you. You can clearly see that there’s some great musicians in the band, with some neat ideas, but they just can’t transfer it all together to make an energizing CD, instead it becomes pretty generic and forgettable.

The album itself is a collection of electro-rock album that could be a mix of Interpol and Coldplay. With sci-fi synth lines threaded throughout it, a steady flow of keyboards, they could also be compared to a mellow mix of The Killers and Death Cab For Cutie. The album is full of twists and turns, going from the slow, keyboard ladenWhy We’re Better Now and flying right into the heavier, more rock-oriented track Shotgun. These little twists can be found in the mix of the songs themselves, jumping from high energy portions to slow instrumental sections within a single song. Of course, the highlight of the album comes from the most unique and out of place track, Broadway And Hurst – the closer which tells a story of alcohol, jealously and murder and is portrayed with spoken parts so well that you can clearly see the events happening in your mind. It literally makes a mini movie reel click on as you see the actions come to pass, there’s very few songs that are able to do that. Sadly, they have 55 seconds of dead air afterwards leading to nothing which makes me wonder what they were doing.

So yeah, the album can get boring. There’s a few songs here and there which jump out, but nothing spectacular. It tends to merge together and just float by in the background. Chances are, the buzz of The Outline and You Smash It, We’ll Build Around It will soon fade into nothingness simply due to the fact that there’s no real hold on it and it just molds into the background of anyone’s CD collection.