Anarbor – Free Your Mind

I rarely read band bios anymore as its rare that they actually offer me much good information. They’re just there to sell the band and most of them just ooze out insincerity and platitudes. But the first lines ofAnarbor‘s bio caught my eye which forced me to read the rest. It said:

Soulful, fresh, genre-defying. These are only a few of the terms that immediately spark the mind when greeted with Anarbor’s gutsy and transcending EP, Free Your Mind. When noted that the aforementioned genre is pop-rock, it seems….

I couldn’t help but laugh at this implausible description. First to call them genre-defying and then define them within a genre in the next sentence seems ludicrous and contradictory. Then, the idea that they’re “soulful, fresh or genre-defying” in any way, shape or form is laughable because at its core, Anarbor‘s Free Your Mind is one of the most generic, paint-by-numbers pop-rock EPs you could ever imagine. They follow seamlessly in the footsteps laid out by recent Hopeless acts like All Time Low or Panic! At The Disco (only without memorable hooks).

The bio goes on to feature a quote from guitarist Mike Kitlas who says “We know that every single kid out there is tired of the same old dance-pop record that gets released every single week. Our goal is to be the music scene’s saving grace. It will tell our listeners that we are here to stay and we are not a fad band that will fade out as soon as dance-pop is outdated.” This little quote, just like the rest of their bio, just jumps out with inaccuracies and annoyances. Having just graduated from high school themselves, they’re just kids so when every quote starts with “the kids” it seems condescending and arrogant. To claim to be the saving grace of music is equally as bad.

Throughout the bio they constantly knock the fad of dance pop and claim to have a distinctive sound that will outlast it all. But they don’t. It’s a lie they feed themselves (and the press) to make themselves feel better. Free Your Mind is not unique or distinctive. It is generic, bland and predictable. Extremely polished with pitch-perfect vocals, there’s nothing real about it as it just another release in a long stream of fad-bands that they seem so determined to rebel against.

On the closing track of the seven song EP, Anarbor asks “What the fuck happened to rock and roll?” for them to find out the answer to that, they just need to play their own EP back to them and they’ll see all the problems of rock and roll.