A lot of music crosses my desk every week, and oftentimes a few bands slip between the cracks. It wasn’t until a few months ago, that I actually sat down and listened to Sleeping With Sirens’ second disc, Let’s Cheers to This. To be entirely honest, the formula sounded pretty standard as emo/post-core bands go, minus lead singer, Kellin Quinn’s high tenor voice. I fastforwarded around a bit, until I found the lone ballad, “All My Heart,” and that one stuck. It made the cut for a mixtape for my wife, and made me wish the band would do more that intimate, using Quinn’s unique vocals.
As luck would have it, while fans are awaiting their third LP in 2013, the Orlando quintet has released a teaser acoustic EP entitled If You Were a Movie, This Would Be Your Soundtrack. The format of the five-song disc imagines the tracks as five scenes from a film, including two reworked tunes and three brand new ones.
“James Dean & Audrey Hepburn” is a complete re-imagining of the similarly-titled, but almost unrecognizable single, “If I’m James Dean, You’re Audrey Hepburn,” off their debut album. Screams and crunching guitars are replaced with harmonies and early-Dashboard style acoustics, and a focus on lyrical delivery and emotion. Scene Two, “Roger Rabbit,” then goes all Pop/R&B and proves Quinn can hang in any genre.
“Don’t You Ever Forget About Me” adds a few more of the band members and plods along at an upbeat tempo, delivering the catchiest track on the album by far. It’s a standout for sure, and I would definitely listen to a whole album of tunes like this, as the Saosin-style they have been most recently moving from already seems overdone. The disc then closes with the other familiar track, “With Ears to See, and Eyes to Hear,” also from their debut record of the same title. Again, they do a bang-up job reworking the track so that a casual listener wouldn’t even notice it was a remake. The angst of “Lie, lie, liar, liar, you’ll pay for your sins” doesn’t sound quite the same without electric guitars mounted behind it, but then again, those lyrics never stood out when listening to the original either.
Try This Track: “Don’t You Ever Forget About Me”
