Review: onesidezero – onesidezero
onesidezero’s self titled release doesn’t come out and hit you over the head with a radio burning single or watered down, pop-influenced track to goad you into a purchase, instead its 49 minutes, and 13 tracks of solid music that boasts an impressive variety in each song’s sound while all seemingly flowing together into a cohesive package.
Being produced by Ulrich Wild, who has done some great work with heavy acts like Pantera and Static-X as well as more melodic bands like Taproot certainly shows an influence in onesidezero’s work as the album progresses. There’s times vocalist Jasan Radford pulls off an uncanny impersonation of 30 Seconds to Mars’ Jared Leto while brooding through some of the album’s slower tracks, and the faster, heavier, more metal tracks scream of a band like Static-X.
The aforementioned writing is dark throughout the album, with emotions running high, its impressive to see the band not catering to what necessarily gets played on the radio, but making music for themselves, and still managing to change things up from track to track giving the listening something different. The album itself takes a few runs through to really click with the listener though. The first time through I wasn’t necessarily impressed with the sound, as it seemed like just about everything out there from a certain standpoint, but after really listening to it, your perspective changes, and you hear that this isn’t like any other generic rock outing from four guys with instruments, it’s a finely crafted piece of work.
There’s a movement of bands to shy away from what made them famous to try new things, and entice new fans in a radio-ready environment, and then there are bands like onesidezero who failed to compromise in the beginning, and through all the trials, breakups, and raw emotion that has been the band’s life, they’ve crafted a fine album that reads like a good book. You don’t pick up everything until the second or third time through, but when you do, everything seems to click and you wonder why they aren’t more popular, burning up that radio dial as true musicians should be.
