Customer Reviews

Way I Feel Today

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Here's a trackbytrack:

So Close - Begins with piano and voice but builds into a wall of sound, haunting, cage-rattling number just as many on the last album.

IOU Love - Very un-Six By Seven. Very beautiful, passionate love song. I absolutely adored it until I realised it owes more than a passing debt to "Love Song" by The Cure. Still, however, by all accounts an amazing track.

All My New Best Friends - A beautiful acoustic ballad, again untypical of the band. Lovely, though, a nocturnal beauty resides in it - reminiscent of the acoustic tracks on Radiohead's The Bends.

Flypaper For Freaks - "I never promised you ... !" screams Chris Olley to open this track before a cacophony of mad guitars enter. Here's a really heavy, thrashalong, punky track.

Speed Is In/Speed Is Out - Veers between tight, controlled menace of the verses and the all-out undiluted screaming fury of the brilliant bridge and chorus.

Karen O - A throbbing bass beat and layers of guitars give it a very Six By Seven-ish feel, but this seems to me one of the weaker tracks overall.

American Beer - A perfect centerpiece. Heartbreaking, building beauty of a song - "Nobody told me it would be like this/nobody showed me how to care". Fantastic lyrics, great music...the best track they've ever done I'd say.

Anyway - An upbeat, cool rock song which is great for a singalong.

The Way I Feel Today - A cathartic track of getting over a broken heart and being happy and free. Really joyful, and accompanied by that wall of sound again.

Cafeteria Rats - Thrashing, nasty track with a brilliantly sneered vocal from Chris Olley.

Bad Man - Another fast, angry punky one. Not the greatest to close on, but not bad either.

Six By Seven continue their trend of moving from atmospheric drone to a more conventional song-oriented wall-of-guitar. To my ears, The Way I Feel Today is like The Closer You Get with higher highs and lower lows. "So Close" kicks off with an ominous piano riff that gets flattened by a thunderous wall of guitar that keeps up for the rest of the song. "IOU Love" softens things a bit, including a somewhat fey flute-like accompaniment near the end. "All My New Best Friends" is a surprise; it's unbelieveably melodic and Beatles-y, and breaks up the album nicely. Then we get "Flypaper", "Speed Is In", and "Karen O", all uptempo punky rockers. They sound flat and monotonous to me- they did this much better on The Closer You Get. I've heard that "American Beer" is supposed to be the album centerpiece, but it does nothing for me. Slow and kind of annoying, the musical equivalent of sitting outside on a hot and extremely humid day. Things bounce back on "Anyway" and "The Way I Feel Today"- mid- to uptempo rockers with an almost triumphant feel to the arrangements. The best songs they've done yet. "Cafeteria Rats" and "Bad Man" go back to the punkish rockers with guitar override, but it works this time, especially Cafeteria Rats. In general, this album makes me curious as to what their next one will sound like.

With their third release The Way I Feel Today, Six by Seven tempers their feedback frenzies long enough to explore a newfound attraction to melody. Chris Olley's vocals are reminiscent of Coldplay's Chris Martin (though The Way I Feel Today was released internationally before Coldplay's latest), and some of the music has a dreamy compression worthy of The Church at their best. (One song - "I.O.U. Love" - owes more to The Church; namely, royalties for stealing the melody of "Under a Milky Way".) Fans of the band's crash'n'burn won't be disappointed; half these tracks clock in at a speedy 2 minute average. You'd think the effect would be schizophrenic, but it's far from it. The reflective songs are there to remind us what we do after the rage is spent.