Album Details

• Artist: Further Seems Forever
• Album: Hide Nothing
• Label: Tooth & Nail
• Year of Release: 2004
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: symphony on 2007-09-14

I think a part of me still cries when I listen to any Further Seems Forever album. It's the only time I can listen to Chris Carraba without wanting to gouge my ears. It's the only time I'll probably ever admit that I love a man, that man is Jason Gleason. And it's the only time when a band breaking up after fighting hard actually stung. Jon Bunch is an amazing vocalist and brought something different to Further Seems Forever. His appearance into the band was a last ditch effort to keep the amazing going. Sadly, it wasn't meant to be. But Hide Nothing stands testament to what FSF was and could have been.

Though by no stretch of the imagination FSF's best album (How to Start a Fire, for the curious) but it is still a sort of masterpiece. The rest of the band continues on the track of putting out power-jams ("Like Someone You Know") but the striking difference is the very bluntless of the lyrics. The writing style is different, vividly different, and it adds a whole new twist to the album. It suddenly elevates its mystique and, more importantly, makes it a lot darker and moodier.

The heart (quite literally) of the album is the two-song combination of "Make It A Part" and "All Rise." Let me start one of my elaborate metaphors coinciding the way the music is to something mundane. Let's say Bunch's vocals is the blood, they are pumped in slowly and sort of deprived, very calm and collected, waiting for the rise--into the heart, filled with oxygen--then flooded back into the system, returns again, and then floods right back out for the finish. "All rise, all rise, all rise...." is chanted into the drums climax and "Make it a part of who we are, love is coming!" returns and the excitement and power is right back into your system.

Like most nations and all good things, they end. The intensity carries into "Call On The Life" but eventually fades. "Bleed" is usually the most hyped song from the record but it doesn't have the raw power that songs like "Light Up Ahead" or "Hide Nothing." The album, however, is still a dark and brooding masterpiece, a final example of what was great.

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