SEEMLESS

If Boston rockers SEEMLESS end up making it big on this album, is anyone gonna send a royalty check to Jonah Jenkins? The mark of that fellow Beantown native, former vocalist of the defunct cult band ONLY LIVING WITNESS, looms large on "What Have We Become", particularly in the vocal department. (For you kiddies keeping score at home, that's the same ONLY LIVING WITNESS covered by SHADOWS FALL on their latest odds-and-sods collection.)

If you need a more familiar reference point, you could try later-era SOUNDGARDEN, with occasional TOOL and KYUSS-like moments. You get the aforementioned vocals, heartfelt and huge, carrying the day in most instances — there's no denying that Jesse Leach is a great singer. On opener "In My Blood", the band keeps up with him and keeps it simple, kicking into a hard-driving anthem with impressive energy. "Cast No Shadow" continues the band's hot streak, building up into a massive chorus that's heavy but quite accessible.

Then, inexplicably, they just seem to lose the plot. "Numb" sounds great, but its larger-than-life production can't mask its clichéd quality. It's a would-be stoner metal anthem bogged down by its bad lyrics and recycled riffage, and it stops the album cold in its tracks. Later, the band's attempts to completely TOOL out and get all proggy, "The Deep Below" and "Parody", just come off as a pretentious, over-produced mess — terminal spaciness with enough stoner rock added to keep them from floating off completely into the ether.

The best "deep album" tracks ("Seven", the corny but decently rockin' "Jaded") are uptempo barn-burners — the speed the band seems most comfortable with. But by the latter half of "What Have We Become", the well seems to have run dry, idea-wise — a song like "Maintain" is a string of wanky riffs, gratuitous cowbell and vocal lines from Leach that start to sound suspiciously similar. By the end of the album, the initial excitement from the first two songs has turned to clock-watching boredom, and the aftertaste of so much filler kills any good vibes the band had stored up.

"What Have We Become" is being positioned as SEEMLESS's breakthrough, and clearly, a lot is riding on this album. That makes it all the more frustrating to have to give it a low mark — it starts out like it's going to be the answer to your summertime blues, a high-octane riff-rock ass-kicker with energy and charisma to burn. But then it sputters out in a wake of its own repetition — a little of the SEEMLESS sound goes a long way, and the band hasn't yet learned to keep things interesting for an entire album. They've got everything else locked down – now they just need to bring better, more interesting songs to the table.