Back when MySpace was a relevant form of, well, anything, there was a proliferation of ‘heartfelt’ emo singer-songwriters that were all the rage. Just when it seemed as though the genre had died out, out of the foxholes comes Braden Barrie, aka SayWeCanFly, with his new EP ‘Darling’.
Judging by this evidence, not a whole lot has changed in the genre since the mid-2000s. The five tracks on this EP are just as wet and dimensionless as they were back in the day, but now the whole thing just feels horribly dated and out of place.
Barrie himself has a nice voice and there’s a least a bit more depth to the title track, but otherwise it’s just a stream of mopey, breathy acoustic emo that’s – in the case of ‘High School’ and ‘When I Come Home’ especially – almost painfully saccharine. ‘Darling’’s lovelorn teenage target audience will undoubtedly find plenty of appeal here, but it’s hard to imagine SayWeCanFly branching out any further than that.
2/5
‘Darling EP’ by SayWeCanFly is released on 23rd October on Epitaph Records.
SayWeCanFly links: Facebook|Twitter|Tumblr|Bandcamp
Words by Luke Nuttall (@nuttall_luke)
