The Forecast - Late Night Coversations

Late Night Conversations, the new CD from The Forecast, proves that it doesn’t matter if you can sing well or not, so long as you can sing loudly with a bunch of people. Rock should be a bit belligerent; The Forecast works only when amidst violent bedlam. Slow croons like “Soft Hands” don’t work—one voice isn’t compelling enough to inspire a following. Nor is their light guitar complex enough to be thrilling or simple enough to be catchy. It’s just there, like that thing in the corner that we don’t talk about. On the other hand (the one that’s not soft, apparently), songs like “These Lights” that pile on an abundance of voices or “Late Night Conversations,” where the sick and furious riff fuels the singers to put their vocal veins into it, have a real zest. Then again, zest is a word I usually reserve for my soap, and every time The Forecast lathers me up, they just as quickly rinse me with the musical equivalent of a cold shower. And yes, there’s shrinkage. (That may or may not be a joke, depending on how into your music you are.) It’s one thing to get bored of a CD, but some of the lengthier songs are too tiresome to even listen through all the way. “Exercise Demons,” sung as a dialogue between Dustin Addis and Shannon Burns is flat after the first verse, and the back-and-forth is so repetitious that it’s like listening to R. Kelly’s “Trapped in the Closet” (sans the opportunity of humor, intentional or inadvertent). The Forecast is way off (like so many weathermen), and the promise of clear skies quickly turns into a mood-dampening drizzle of mediocre bits and pieces. [www.the-forecast.net]