Album Review: Dream On, Dreamer - Heartbound

Take equal parts heavily sung, scream-laden choruses and clean, melodic verses, combine with one part chugging guitars, mix, toss in blender, then sprinkle with a generous amount of synth, and what do you get? Well, the sonic formula of an endless string of sound-a-likes and copycats, but for the purpose of this review, you get the structure of pretty much every song off Dream On, Dreamer’s latest, ‘Heartbound.’

‘Heartbound’ starts out well enough, with the monstrous combination of ‘I’ and ‘Yourself As Someone Else,’ and by the time the album’s second track ends, you pretty know what you’re in store for. The clean vocals follow the screams, a predictable vocal pattern that sits atop a bed of crunchy, slick guitars, and admirable dubstep infused breakdowns. ‘Heartbound’ is littered with too much filler, songs that seem to have no other purpose than to just occupy space and gum up the works (‘Downfall,’ ‘A Path Of Its Own’), but it’s not all bad essentially, as there are a few tracks here and there worth listening to (‘Come Home True Love,’ ‘Lifestream’) . The problem here though is that the creative well runs dry before ‘Heartbound’ reaches its halfway point, and by then it’s easily understandable if you’ve grown tired of listening to the same song over and over again.

While the best adjective that could be used to describe ‘Heartbound’ is generic, if you spend some time with it, you’ll realize there are some things to like here, and ultimately Dream On, Dreamer shows potential. It’s just too bad for these guys though that there is probably a handful (at least) of bands on their very own label (Rise) that sounds exactly like this, but better.

2.5/5

'Heartbound' is out now on Rise Records.

Brian Campbell