I listened to the album “Life At Best” from the country music band called Eli Young Band. I found one song with a catchy melody and one song that would work as a for hire demo, but “Life At Best” as a whole is not the best at anything. Well, maybe at inducing yawns.
“Even If It Breaks Your Heart”: Light pop rock country with good production value and vocals that are not terrible. However, the song is too easy to tune out to when listening, or not being able to maintain listening. Nice message though if you catch it: keep on dreaming even if it breaks your heart.
“Crazy Girl”: This is a song fail. You can’t get away with calling a girl crazy and silly and expect it to work out romantically. Maybe you can, but it feels like he is talking down to her in this song.
“Every Other Memory”: And laa laa laa la la boring boring bored.
“On My Way”: This song did not wake me up from the last one, which is sad, because it his a real up beat jangly tune, just boring and generic.
“Skeletons”: Very catchy. It is still fairly bland, but there is a hook that catches you with the melody and drags you along.
“I Love You”: A weak excuse of a ballad. Might as well make it an instrumental and say “I love you,” over and over again as the rest of the lyrics added nothing of interest.
“The Fight”: Eli Young Band has failed to catch my attention with anything yet. This is another song without any wow factor or any worthy of playing at all factor.
“My Old Man’s Son”: This song seems to drag on forever. It is a storytelling approach without any real story, just him stating that he is something other people cannot be: his old man’s son. This makes him his mom’s secret weapon, loaded gun? This song is stupid.
“Recover”: “Heartache hurts when you can’t move on.” Really? I grade this song F -. Oh, you’ll discover, you’ll recover. A elementary school kid could have done this one.
“The Falling”: If country music were movies, this one would be a direct to DVD stinker. Bargain bin fodder.
“War On A Desperate Man”: A lot of God and Demons blabber and whining in a ballad. I guess he is supposed to seem desperate, so one could argue that the whining fit’s the theme.
“Say Goodnight”: More boring junk.
“How Quickly You Forget”: This song starts with a cool vibe, but lyrically it is less cool. Some tweaks here and there and Eli Young Band could make a decent single. This showed some promise under the skin, but I’d stay away from the skin due to all of the pus leaking sores.
“Life At Best”: And out with the same whimper. This album is a dust collector.