Source: Album artwork
The resurgence of melancholic emo music has been well documented already. From Sorority Noise‘s outstanding You’re Not As ___ As You Think to the more upbeat readdition of Sonny Moore to the lineup of From First To Last, to Casey‘s slow but inevitable rise, there are quite a few bands still making “emo” in 2017. As mad a prospect as this sounds, Free Throw are here to bring a little cohesion to the scene and bring some much-needed variety with their songs too.
Bear Your Mind is far from a perfect album. It’s abundantly clear from the start that the main focus of the music is supposed to be the vocals, and as accomplished a singer as Cory Castro may be, the vocal delivery is not always interesting enough to justify the main weight of the music being placed on him. It’s occasionally difficult to know what Castro is on about – the lyrics are purposefully vague at points, but they are at least delivered in such a manner as to make you realize that even if you don’t know what he’s talking about, he does at least mean it.
Thankfully the album does not stick solely to the melancholic. Songs like ‘Rinse. Repeat.‘ veer more towards pop-punk and actually do it quite well, whereas ‘Randy, I Am The Liquor‘ and ‘Weak Tables‘ have more shouty, more aggressive parts that form a welcome counterpoint to the slower, quieter traditional emo sections that make up most of the album.
Though it is not quite the finished article, Bear Your Mind is an album that Free Throw should be happy with. It’s a solid point from which to build on something that may become genuinely rather interesting, and if Free Throw can up their game even slightly on the back of this then there’s no reason for them to not be a music act that we will all be hearing a lot more of in days to come.
