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My main thought about this CD: It's sad to see a band with a little bit of talent or ability in a particular style of music insist on doing a second-rate imitation of something else. Harsh words, perhaps, but I'd say it's true. What genre to try to stuff them in depends on who you ask: Wiki says metalcore, deathcore, and sludge metal; the band's MySpace page claims "Metal/Down-tempo/Psychedelic" while the PR blurb insists they're too melodic for death metal and too brutal for metalcore. Calling them death metal would be questionable at best, but I'm going to be a little lazier and lump them into post-hardcore.
It's sort of appropriate that I would do a review of Fiction Plane around the antiVersary, given the first review. That was, of course, Big Dume's Inside My Head, fronted by the son of songwriter and record producer, wherein I raised the question of how relevant pedigree was to musical ability. Here we have that question again; in this case, Fiction Plane front man Joe Sumner is the son of none other than Gordon Sumner, better known as Sting. The circumstances are a little different for this CD, though: whereas Inside My Head was the band's debut CD and was promoted alongside a "reality" TV show starring the front man, Left Side of the Brain is the third studio recording and second full-length album from a band that's been around since 2000.
Indulge me for a moment before I get to the actual review of this CD. To see where I'm coming from, you have to take into account the history of the band--full disclosure, Tantric was one of my favorite bands pretty much from the time they came out, and it was disappointing that there was such a lull between releases. Once upon a time, there were three guys rounding out a band called Days of the New, who quit or were fired depending on the story you hear. What else was there to do besides grab a vocalist and create a new band? Get a platinum record? Awesome. Record a follow-up that gets depressingly little attention? Well, there's only so much you can do when your label doesn't do much for you. Record a third CD... wait, here's where things go downhill. Instead of getting to release the CD, you have issues with your label, which is also having legal issues of its own. The three who were originally members of Days of the New individually left the band for varying reasons, leaving vocalist Hugo Ferreira to figure out what to do. The solution: hire a new band and, by and large, record a whole new CD rather than releasing a CD full of songs written with departed members.
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well i guess it works out pretty nicely in the end...fans get a whole new album/band.
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what was the reality show he was on? i didnt know sting's son was popping up on those programs.