Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) – You Will Eventually Be Forgotten
Reviewed By: Ethan Carney
Rating: 9/10
Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) tell a collection of eleven vivid stories in one stellar album. The two piece emo-revival band from Michigan consist of Keith and Cathy Latinen. Both of them excel in their vocals as well as their instrumentals. You Will Eventually Be Forgotten is the duo’s second album and is an excellent sophomore experience. This album makes you feel like an onlooker to eleven varying life events and you just can’t look away.
The music of this album is less at the forefront of each song as much as it is an accompaniment for each story that is being told on each track. Latinen has a voice that isn’t as deep as Morgan Freeman’s, but still serves to deliver a narrative all the same. The vocals on the album really pull you in and just don’t let go as you listen for each developing detail of the story being told in each song. In one song you could be listening to a vivid retelling of a trip that was taken to a festival held by a local church and in the next you could be taken behind the wheel of a swerving car as it hits a patch of ice on the highway. No matter where the song takes you, you are at the mercy of the lyrics. Unfortunately that means you don’t always get the details of the story you want, especially when it comes to the ending of the story. My first and only hang up with the album when listening to it was that at the end of each song the listener isn’t given a dramatic conclusion to finish the story being told.
I quickly realized however that this wasn’t the point. Each song wasn’t meant to be an epic journey featuring explosions, dragons, or other typical over the top story elements of literature and film. The stories being told on You Will Eventually Be Forgotten are more like the life stories you and your best friends would share over a campfire on a brisk November night. That’s the beauty of the album. The songs and the stories in them are crafted so well that you feel like you were actually there or that you could have sworn you experienced a similar situation to the ones being retold on this album. Empire! Empire! (I Was a Lonely Estate) are expert story tellers and I look forward to our next campfire together.
FCC: Clean
Tracks to Check Out: 3 (“We Are People Here. We Are Not Numbers”), 5 (“You Have To Be So Much Better Than You Ever Thought”), and 9 (“If It’s Bad News, It Can Wait”)
Recommended If You Like: American Football, La Dispute, or Mineral
