“Easy Way Out,” Virgin Forest’s latest album since its debut LP “Joy Atrophy,” is one of those albums that seems to give direct insight into the band’s feelings and does not hold anything back. The sentiments are sometimes difficult to follow on an album that consists primarily of emotionally heavy tracks.
The 10 tracks that make up “Easy Way Out” take listeners on a nearly half-hour journey through expressions of love, blues, loneliness and uncertainty. While some songs communicate their meanings better or more clearly than others, frontman Scott Stapleton and the rest of Virgin Forest do demonstrate emotional range and experience.
The lyrics of the opening song, “Don’t Be Afraid,” say little more than what the title implies, but the electric guitar on this track serves the group well as a supplement for repetitive lyrics. While the music seems to overpower the lyrics, this song provides a good taste of what is to come and sets the tone for a string of songs in which the music is just as sentimental ““ if not more so ““ than the words.
“Different Blues” is one of the most emotionally charged tracks on the album, and it does the best job of conveying the precarious feeling of not knowing what to do “when I get those different blues.” The following track, “Get Away,” is more direct in its instructions to the song’s subject, and it is one of the few songs in this album that actually benefits from repetition of the title line itself in the lyrics.
“Big Old Mama” and “Song for Nino” provide some relief from the more melancholy and gloomy vibes that tend to dominate the album, and they break up the track list with sweeter and softer melodies. “Song for Nino” even contains the lines, “I’d bend down just to pick you up / And you would reach up to kiss me,” which seems to refer to a parent-child relationship that is not explored anywhere else on the album.
However, the rest of the album continues much in the same fashion as the first few songs, with the title track alluding to someone having taken the “easy way out” and the subsequent song “Home Alone” once again resorting to repetition of the title line to get its point across.
“Lifted” has the most rock-and-roll feel out of all of the songs and really showcases a strong electric guitar performance, but it is also one of the darkest tracks.
Overall, Virgin Forest does a good job of creating an effective musical background for each of the songs on “Easy Way Out” but has difficulty coming up with lyrics that match the emotions conveyed by the music. This slight disjunction creates a rift between the band’s sound and vocals that rely too heavily on repetition to get their point across. The “thumbs down” on the album’s cover is also a bit ironic. Despite its struggles, “Easy Way Out” still demonstrates the band’s growth and its potential, given the powerful melodies on this album.
Email Seikaly at aseikaly@media.ucla.edu.