Fall River - Lights Out

Good band, good label, solid album, rising buzz... then the band breaks up. I hate it when that happens. I'm talking about Fall River, a Pennsylvania band that put out an EP and an album, Lights Out (on Thorp). Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Isis, etc.) mixed the album, which had a vocal cameo by Sean Ingram of Coalesce. Clearly the band knew the right people, and with a slot on the Masters of Horror soundtrack (more on that tomorrow), things looked up for them.

But the band's MySpace says they recently broke up due to "financial, creative, and personal differences." So their legacy is an album that showed a ton of potential. Their sound was metallic hardcore in the Botch/Coalesce/Converge vein, with touches of Southern groove. Of course, bands everywhere do the Southern groove thing now, but when I heard this album last year, the sound wasn't played out yet. The performances are a little stiff, and the mix is somewhat sterile, but this stuff must have gone off live.

Fall River - The President Has Been Kidnapped By Ninjas
Fall River - DNA of a Liar

The band's singer, Ali, put down one of the most crushing female vocal performances I've heard. She's easily up there with Ally French and Candace Kucsulain. I interviewed her for AMP; you can read that here. She's in a new band called Spark Is A Diamond, which has a much different, dance punk sound. I honestly don't know what to think of it, but Bayles is mixing the band's debut EP, so it's probably worth checking out. In the meantime, pick up Lights Out

@ Thorp
@ Interpunk