Moneen – The Red Tree

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impulse buy

Vagrant Records
Produced by Brian McTernan

After extensive touring, a reasonably well received sophomore effort and a documentary chronicling the struggle of the first week of recording this very CD, Moneen’s third album arrives three years after the last one

The defiant Don’t Ever Tell Locke What He Can’t Do, which obviously takes its title theme from the ‘Lost’ TV series where a character called John Locke, who became disabled, refused to let people tell him what he could and could not do because of his disability, opens the album in a typically “emo” fashion, shouting out proudly against everyone else (as remarkably “unique” emo-kids do, although oddly in a very Perry Farrell voice here). If Tragedy’s Appealing, Then Disaster’s An Addiction is equally defiant, featuring a chorus declaring “I’m not a failure now!”, and also exhibiting some complex and awesome drumming from Peter Krpan.

Aside from the talents of Krpan and the bizarrely lengthy song titles, as the album goes on it becomes clear that every other aspect of Moneen’s music can be found elsewhere. From the vocal delivery to the riffs to stop-start clean-heavy song structure. It’s all so “been there, done that”. If you’re a new band that isn’t creating something different to what’s already out there, you’re simply treading water, and that’s the feeling The Red Tree creates. The the band are far from talentless, but they’re not yet showing much creativity.

It’s just so unremarkably similar to everything else in the genre that it’s very difficult to offer up any reasons for or against buying this CD ahead of the plethora of others available. There are of course plenty of bands doing this sort of thing much worse than Moneen, but there are also bands doing it just as well, if not better. If this is your thing, this is probably as good as it gets, and the song titles warrant further investigation on their own, but if you’re already into Coheed & Cambria , Muse, or any other young bands intelligently channeling their angst, you probably won’t want to bother.

“ unremarkably similar to everything else ”

Tracklist: Don’t Ever Tell Locke What He Can’t Do / If Tragedy’s Appealing, Then Disaster’s An Addiction / Bleed And Blister (version 3) / The Day No One Needed To Know / This Is All Bigger Than Me / The Frightening Reality of The Fact That We Will All Have To Grow Up And Settle Down One Day / The Politics of Living And The Shame of Dying / The East Has Stolen What The West May Want / Seasons Fade…Fevers Rage…It’s A Slow Decay / There Are A Million Reasons For Why This May Not Work… And Just One Good One For Why It Will / The Song I Swore Not To Sing

Written by Andy Lye
More: Albums, Moneen