{"id":8709,"date":"2012-02-01T07:00:09","date_gmt":"2012-02-01T11:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/southeastofheaven.com\/?p=8709"},"modified":"2022-01-06T19:53:37","modified_gmt":"2022-01-07T00:53:37","slug":"album-review-touchstone-the-city-sleeps","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/?p=8709","title":{"rendered":"Album Review: Touchstone &#8211; The City Sleeps"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><strong><a href=\"https:\/\/southeastofheaven.com\/?attachment_id=8710\" rel=\"attachment wp-att-8710\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-8710\" title=\"touchstone\" src=\"https:\/\/southeastofheaven.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/touchstone.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"225\" height=\"225\" \/><\/a>Touchstone &#8211; The City Sleeps<\/strong><br \/>\n<strong>Release Date<\/strong>: 2011<br \/>\n<strong>Hightlights<\/strong>: None<\/p>\n<p>Female fronted Metal is scrutinized more so than just about any genre of Metal out there. I am a huge fan of female fronted Metal because when it&#8217;s done well, it can cut through the muck and really stand strong. Unfortunately, Touchstone falls short of this task. The production quality of &#8220;The City Sleeps&#8221; is quite stellar and while the band mixes influences of bands ranging from Evanescence to the keyboards of Rush, the band fails at delivering anything of quality.<\/p>\n<p>As a band, Touchstone is more than able to keep up with the big dogs when it comes to playing ability but playing ability just isn&#8217;t enough if you don&#8217;t have the songs. Opening song &#8220;Corridors&#8221; is a prime example of this. It opens with probably one of the most annoying &#8220;riffs&#8221; I&#8217;ve ever heard. The song does progress into some cool musical areas only to plagued by the sub-par lyrics and mediocre vocals of singer Kim Seviour. &#8220;When The Shadows Fall&#8221; only made matter worse as they attempt to capture the male\/female vocal dynamic with a mediocre male vocalist only to fail yet again at delivering anything of quality.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Throw Them To The Sky&#8221; actually proved a pretty cool song that exercised some really great band dynamics but yet again, it&#8217;s the sub-par vocals and even more sub-par lyrics that make it nearly impossible to listen to this without shaking your head. &#8220;The City Sleeps&#8221; is an album plagued by mediocrity. For a band that boasts that they describes themselves as &#8220;A band who combine the prog sensibilities of Yes with the hard rocking aptitudes of Van Halen&#8221;, they don&#8217;t even come close to verifying this statement. It&#8217;s obvious that the band&#8217;s talent is there but the ability to apply that to well written songs is not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Touchstone &#8211; The City Sleeps Release Date: 2011 Hightlights: None Female fronted Metal is scrutinized more so than just about any genre of Metal out there. I am a huge fan of female fronted Metal because when it&#8217;s done well, it can cut through the muck and really stand strong. Unfortunately, Touchstone falls short of this task. The production quality of &#8220;The City Sleeps&#8221; is quite stellar and while the band mixes influences of bands ranging from Evanescence to the [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,277],"tags":[714],"class_list":["post-8709","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-album-reviews","category-music-news","tag-touchstone"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8709","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8709"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8709\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19831,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8709\/revisions\/19831"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8709"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8709"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.southeastofheaven.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8709"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}