Review
Maker
Mirrors

Maker have been a band for a few years now crawling out of the Massachusetts hardcore scene. The band play a style of pop punk that relies on speed and bolstered by breakdowns and gang vocals. The band had signed to 6131 records about a year ago after a handful of EPs and Split records. So far nothing particularly different from any other band in their scene really.

The band start of fast with the energetic title track. The band rattles through one of the longer songs on the record (clocking in at three and a half minutes) starting pretty fast with forceful melodic vocals and gang chants throughout. While it may seem strange to start the record with one of the longer songs in a weird way it seems to work. The song features a little bit of everything that the band does musically. Sadly this also leaves the things the band does best to be overshadowed by the other things the band does. This is remedied to a degree by the second track "Earthquakes". This song focuses almost solely on the more melodic aspects of the band. Building the song with clean melodic vocals allows the song to sound pretty emotional and it continues to build from there. The song never seems to devolve into shouting or gang chants, also there is nary a breakdown to be found. While it would be hard to say anything bad about this song it seems to drain much of the energy that the band would generally want to start their record with.

Everything on the record is played well with a sense of purpose for each part or instrument. The drums make good use of this as they are played with force but still allow room for short fills and breaks. Otherwise there isn't much to truly separate Maker from their peers which i could venture to include bands such as The Story So Far and Such Gold among others. Thats where the intangibles come in which play a huge role in the reasons for this band to stick out.

There are a few small caveats with this record. The aforementioned sequencing issues do appear throughout, amazingly each time this does come up the band seems to step up and by the next track the record has picked up again. The production is super clear allowing no grit to come through, ever this makes the record sound completely flat at points while in others it makes the vocals or guitar lines sound bigger than the world.

Overall Maker are a band for anyone into this style of pop-punk to keep their eye on if they don't know of them already. This young band has managed to do a good job on their debut although it also shows how much further they have to go to lead the pack. This is a good start and a rather enjoyable record overall.