Posted on: June 5, 2013 Posted by: James McQuiston Comments: 0

 

This is the perfect middle-ground between pop-rock and emo, with the same Linkin Park-esque guitars (especially in tracks like “Gun In Hand”) and Hawthorne Heights-esque double-vocals. While a number of the earliest tracks on “Bled of Color” really don’t rise above their constituent parts, the first real exciting track comes soon after in “Bury Me (The Scarlet Path).” “Bury Me” has guitars that in their virtuosity pull up the rest of the track to an acceptable level. What really hinders Stutterfly during this album is their reliance on clichéd guitar riffs and oft-used song structure on the vast majority of this disc. The first real single on this disc comes half-way through the disc’s run-time, in “Burnt Memories”. The track has a very recallable set of lyrics, replete with proper guitar noodling and vacillation between the fuzzy edge of the guitars and the sharper vocals.

The production on “Bled of Color” is perfect but really inserts a wall between Stutterfly and their audience. Everything is perfectly rendered on this disc, but there is a distance between the band and their audience that only is crossed for brief moments during the disc. This bridging can be found on tracks like “Formula of Flesh”, which incorporates the best parts of the previous tracks on the disc to make individuals invest more into the disc than they had previously. In fact, the band seems to get into some sort of a groove during this later part of the second half of the disc, with “ The Sun Bleeds Red” continuing this upturn in things. The double-bass drumming and the repetition of the title phrase really puts the track far above much of the other fare on this disc; this could conceivably find a home on “All Things Rock”.

The momentum that was going for Stutterfly dissipates during “Shallow Reasons”, but this does not necessarily mean that the track is weak. It just again falls back behind the barrier that strangles Stutterfly throughout the entire of this disc, and for this track to do that after two exemplary tracks before it seems to be much more of a black-slide than it would be if the entire disc sounded the same. The penultimate track on “Bled of Color” seems to bring Stutterfly in a direction that may be more of a promised land than any of the others on the disc. This more nuanced and contemplative sound of “Life’s Disease” destroys any problem that the band may have had connecting to their audience, and really should be their direction for their next album.

Top Tracks: The Sun Bleeds Red, Life’s Disease

Rating: 5.0/10

Stutterfly And We Are Bled of Color CD Review/ Maverick / 13 Tracks / http://www.stutterfly.com / http://www.maverick.com /

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