Antietam
Victory Park

(Carrot Top)

First Appeared in The Music Box, October 2004, Volume 11, #10

Written by Brad Podray

If a band is going to go through the trouble of naming itself after the bloodiest conflict of the American Civil War, it should have something important to say. Sadly, Antietam’s seventh outing Victory Park is drably mediocre, and its strangely low-fi recording quality is a distinct hindrance to the ensemble’s sound. The drums don’t hit all that hard, the vocals are muffled, and given each song features the same tempo and structure, there’s an utter lack of diversity to the collection. Even worse, there are times when the only way to tell that the track has changed is to notice whether Tara Key or Tim Harris is singing.

To Antietam’s credit, there are some original melodies scattered like Easter eggs throughout Victory Park — the intro to I Swear, for example. Key’s vocal style is soothingly competent, but Harris, on the other hand, is a far less dynamic singer with a voice as distracting and difficult to grasp as that of Dinosaur Jr.’s J. Mascis. As a whole, the album is laid-back and simple, but while it’s far from being a terrible effort, it isn’t the type of work that would cause 20,000 people to engage in a fight to the death...or to head to the store to purchase it, for that matter.

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Ratings

1 Star:   Pitiful
2 Stars: Listenable
3 Stars: Respectable
4 Stars: Excellent
5 Stars: Can't Live Without It!!

Copyright © 2004 The Music Box