Farewell - Isn’t This Supposed To Be Fun!?

Rock is, if you choose to believe North Carolina sextet Farewell, the preserve of the doom-laden, the ponderous and the just plain grumpy. Their mission is to reverse this – hence their album’s enthusiastically-punctuated title – with a collection of thirteen bright’n’breezy three-minute pop vignettes with more power chords and tongue-tying lyrics than you can shake a stick at. Never mind that HelloGoodbye, Panic at the Disco and Fall Out Boy got there first – it’s the good intentions that count.

And, by and large, their intentions transfer well onto record. ‘Isn’t This Supposed to be Fun!?’ occupies a territory more akin to power-pop than the ‘rock’ they wish to change; but Farewell slot neatly into its pantheon. Lead singer Marshall Davis’ vocals have more than a touch of the Patrick Stump about them; ‘Anchors Away’ even mines the same lyrical vein as ‘Sugar We’re Going Down’. Such cheeky musical winks to their forefathers pervade the album – ‘Eighty-Eights’ resembles a Panic b-side, while ‘First One on the Blog’ is the kind of sparkly, no-nonsense punk-pop that early Blink 182 would have made, had they used their internet connections for anything other than looking at porn.

Ironically, despite being the most ponderous song on the album, standout track ‘War’ comes close to unseating their musical forefathers, with the broadest scope and fieriest underbelly of anything on the album. While the rest of ‘Isn’t This Supposed to be Fun!?’ does what it says on the tin, and will be fun for some, it could come across as insubstantial to others. Farewell’s strength seems to lie less in fun, and more in weight – it’ll be interesting to find out whether their next album sees them grow up.