line of site

maritime glass floor

while the rest of the syndication/blogging community was in santa clara tonight at some supernova dinner, i decided to go to enjoy the best san francisco has to offer...the the bottom of the hill where ironically, tonight a band was playing a show to promote the next disc i was planning to review, maritme glass floor.

maritime, if you don't know, and since there was only me an seventeen other people there tonight (i could count), you don't know, is composed of two founding members of the promise ring (davey von bohlen [guitar/vocals] and dan didier [drums]) and one member of the dismemberment plan (eric alexelson [bass]) - who collectively recorded two of the best emo albums of all time: nothing feels good and emergency & i, respectively. oh the sadness of it all that dashboard confessional can get radio airplay and an MTV unplugged album and these guys can't even get their recording distributed at amazon. (you can buy it at stinkweeds)

and if you at all want to show some props for these emo legends, you should.

glass floor nowhere approaches the perfection of nothing feels good but is more of a logical extension of where the promise ring left off with emergency! emergency! with a little bit of their swan song, wood/water. these guys have no trouble hiring good producers, this time hiring j. robbins of dino jr. fame to do the dirty deeds, apparently, done dirt cheap.

you can say von bohlen can't sing, and you might be right, but his songwriting is strong enough to pull this disc off. and cut him some slack, the guy had a metal plate put in his head a few years ago, as a result of complications of a brain tumor and the surgery to remove it.

the highlights are "adios" and "someone has to die", and the rest of the disc is at a level close to those. i mean, on every song you have the same somewhat dissonant telecaster sound, with the light percussion of didier keeping the songs moving. the bass is a little buried - something that was even more apparent after hearing this band live.

bottom line is, if you lament the demise of TPR, this is the best you are going to get right now...otherwise, this might be a bit out on the edge for you, but still worth checking out if you are looking for some straightforward, mellow rock.