Album Review: Gone is Gone – Echolocation (Rise Records)

Gone is Gone are a super-group consisting of Troy Sanders, the singer and bass player from Mastodon, Troy Van Leeuwen, guitarist for Queens of the Stone Age, Tony Hajjar, the drummer for At the Drive-In, and Mike Zarin founder of Sencit Music. 

Echolocation is their debut album & is available now via Rise Records wherever music is streamed or sold!

A well received EP in July 2016 as well as the raft of talent that makes up Gone is Gone has made this debut album one of the more hotly anticipated releases of 2017 but going on the opening of Sentient it’s hard to see why. The soft haunting melody & quietly sung vocals sounds nice but hardly excites…and then it hits. It hits hard.

Unexpectedly it just explodes into an incredibly heavy beat with a very sexy guitar riff playing in the background. It could almost be a completely different song, it’s that good. Everything gets turned up & Troy Sanders let’s his incredible vocal range soar. Even when it does drop back into the softer melody it has a sense of urgency that was missing at the start.

Gift couldn’t be more different with its upbeat radio friendly tune & faster pace but highlights a problem found throughout the entire album. You see, it’s a bit confusing listening to one song on this album after another as it seems to struggle with its identity. It all feels a bit disjointed & unfortunately comes across as several artists jamming together rather then a complete band.

They’re making good music, some really great music but it just leaves you feeling unsatisfied. The eclectic styles of these 4 musicians really comes across throughout though combining variations of rock & metal. Songs like Resurge with its prog style guitars, Ornament with its bass driven drum beats (vocally it’s one of the best on the album) & the disjointed style of Fast Awakening.

Gone is Gone do haunting & soft melodies well too with Roads in particular getting under your skin with a constant threatening sombre pace that grows & grows as it plays out. One of the best songs on the album.

That’s the thing…there are plenty of great sounding songs here, stuff that really gets the blood pumping but there are also far too many boring & bland sounding songs like Dublin, a song that just never gets out of the starting blocks or Colourfade, a song that could put you to sleep it’s so’nothing’.

Expectation was high, probably too high & the end result is far too messy.

Echolocation is an album that I wanted to love but the reality is that it’s too hit & miss to be anything but a good album, a damn good one but that’s it. At 55 minutes long it overstays its welcome & it’s easy to point at certain songs that could have easily been left on the cutting room floor.

Overall Track Listing:

1. Sentient
2. Gift
3. Resurge
4. Dublin
5. Ornament
6. Pawns
7. Colourfade
8. Roads
9. Slow Awakening
10. Fast Awakening
11. Resolve
12. Echolocation