'This bed, it feels so cold'

The other day a friend recommended a site called purevolume.com as a source of new bands to review for this blog. It's a fantastic site actually - kin of like last.fm but with a fantastic feature (that i always was a bit annoyed last.fm never had) called profile jump. Basically you choose a genre of music, click go and the site redirects you to a page of a random band/artist. It took me all of a second to realise that this is fantastic for my blog and so here we go, the first band of purevolume.com:

HE IS WE

Again, funny name but I'm sure we'll get over that pretty quickly. Unfortunately once again these guys have no available downloads so I'll have to rely once again on just music from their plasylist which has a good 7 tracks on it so we shuld be able to get enough of out them.


So the first notable point of this band is that from the first track we are introduced to the idea of simple instrumental helped along and very much enhanced by solid, flowing vocals. And when i say solid, i mean that this girl really can sing. Whilst almost a cross between kind of Kelly Clarkson, Florence and - dare i say it? - Avril Lavigne, she's got a great vocal range and springy quality to her voice which gives her melodies a lot of emotion and can come across as very soulful. 
All of this would of course be fantastic if she didn't sound just that little bit like every other American female pop singer around at the moment. Except for the fact that under the overlying acoustic pop kind of sounds, there's definately an undertone of something more serious and less...Hannah Montana? I actually feel kinda harsh slandering the name of a girl who can definately sing very very well, but i think in recent times, with my taste in music being erratic like it is, i think i'm always expecting and hoping for something with that edge. Something that will cause me to prick my ears up and pay more attention than i was previously. And while this certainly isn't the bland, uninteresting music of a lot of acousitc pop out there, there just isn't enough of a spark to get any kind of fire started for me.



Now this is the hard part of this kind of review where i have to defend what i've just said and every verdict i've come to in previous reviews. And i hear you saying 'well how is this girl different from Jenny Owen Youngs? Or that Florence girl you keep comparing everyone to?' and I'll admit that it's a far more subtle difference than you might think. I am 300% NOT saying this band isn't good. In fact as a band i think they're fantastic. Very solid composition, lyrics that, as i said before, impress me a great deal, and an overall feeling through the songs of well structured, well thought out music. Which of course is a lot more than a lot of female singers can produce these days. I'm only saying that when the first similar artist that comes to mind is a cross between Kelly Clarkson and Hannah Montana, I just think this isn't the kind of music i want to hear. 
And i know for a fact that at least a couple of readers of this blog probably will like her, so i'm not gonna end this review on a negative. 
I honestly think this is the first band in this blog i haven't liked purely because they were shit. This goes way deeper than that, and I'm sorry we couldn't all be friends