The Bunny The Bear – Stories

 

Band: The Bunny The Bear
Album: Stories
Record Label: Victory Records
Release Date: 16th April 2013
Reviewed By: Craig

 

Track Listing:

1. Eating Disorder
2. In Like Flynn
3. Hey, Allie
4. It's Not Always Cold in Buffalo
5. Another Day
6. The Frog
7. Melody
8. Imagine
9. Your Reasons
10. What We're Here For
11. Sadie

 

Stand Out Tracks: Eating Disorder

 

 

The "Dance Infused" metallers 'The Bunny The Bear' are back with their 3rd album in as many years. This album is being released via Victory Records and is called 'Stories'.

 

At this point, many of our readers will have stopped reading this review already because of the banned word in the above sentence – Dance. This review is a tricky one because you could class The Prodigy as Dance Infused metal (scraping the barrel I know) but I am partial to a bit of The Prodigy so I figured I would give this one a listen to.

 

I put the album onto my phone, put my earphones in and pressed play. I must tell you now that there is no similarity to The Prodigy, this really is "Dance" metal in that you have all the Dance beats, dance music and soft vocals blended in with bits of guitars, drums and occasional scream core style vocals.

 

This album is already generating a lot of good reviews and a lot of hype round the net. I have listened to the album around 5 or 6 times now and have found that the first song 'Eating Disorder' is quite catchy, but it is still more dance than metal. The rest of the album seems to feature less metal and more dance with each song.

 

I like to think of myself as being quite open minded with different styles of metal and music in general given that my musical tastes go as far from Country, Blues and even Classical music up to Thrash, Death and Black Metal. I personally could not get into this album. I appreciate that The Bunny The Bear are quite a popular band and are quite innovative especially with their concerts, but dance and metal together? My own personal opinion (which will differ to other peoples) in this circumstance is this; mixing more dance than metal is like mixing shit with sugar and trying to make it taste nice.

 

Readers of All About The Rock might be able to tell me when dance and metal has blended perfectly (except for The Prodigy) however, the equilibrium of dance to metal seems to be out of kilter here. I don't know if this was an intentional decision made by The Bunny The Bear, but if it was then all credit to them for trying to push the boundaries of metal.

 

What I am trying to get across here is that to me it is 80% dance mixed with 20% metal and the style used does not compliment either genre. This is not meant to take anything away from The Bunny The Bear because after all, they have had the balls to "break the mould" and be innovative with their music.

 

Given the response on the internet it will be interesting to see how metallers welcome the new sound as and when they tour over this year and next.

 

As regular readers will know our 'bread and butter' is rock and metal. Reviewing this from a metal point of view I have scored this however, there is always going to be an element of subjectivity to my final score.

 

I think people who have come from a dance background before they saw the light and found metal may appreciate this because the songs themselves, if the dance music wasn't as prevalent, would not be bad and the production of the album is good with a crisp and clear sound.

 

Taking everything into account, the score for this album is:

Score: 5 out of 10

Readers album score: {extravote 1}