Complete Windows and Shadows. Release Date : March, 2005. Label: Spawner Records. Rating: Andy doesn't dig rating stuff. Oh, Complete. Always hovering around my radar but never yet entirely honing in. Well that's about to change, my friends. This album's pretty solid. The drumming is perpetually absurd, and I mean that in the greatest way. Tickittytickittytickitty.... I thought , oh maybe it's just how they start the record. But it continues, at least into the second song. How some people can move their hands so quick is beyond me. The chorus in "Broken" really supah cool, as is the breakdown in "Wait". They accomplish light whispery harmonizing, and then exploding into a catapulting wail. Ah, emo. Thank goodness it lives up to its name. It gets all metal at the end. This all hums with a pinching melancholy, a tremor beneath the surface that feels like shredding tissue and flying feathers... just a sort of ... regret? anger? general despondency? It's a delicate album. "Windows and Shadows" has another sorta metal guitar interlude. It's a great bringing-in of the less-cheesy/more-delightful things about 'emotional rock' of the 80s... those being, of course, the indominable hair-metal ballads. Brilliant! Come on, don't deny it, you all loved that, you all still have that Skid Row "18 And Life" cassette single kicking around in a drawer somewhere that you pull out and dance around in your underwear to sometimes, singing into a turkey baster. One thing about this music is its insane ability to get you moving around. You can't help it - the feverishness seeps into your bones and makes you lose control of your muscles. The fury and the tears inside it wrap themselves in a thick blanket around you until you just can't help but feel as though the emotions were your own, forming and shaping and escaping from your body and lips rather than the bands'. The music on this album, in individual songs, traverses this huge range of chopped-up melodies and riffs... it's like a brand new landscape in each one, with rocks, trees, eagles, oceans, caverns... and some incredible screaming going on in "A Poet's Suicide." "Ghost In The Clock" has a deliciously-dark opening with this echoey spacey guitar.... yeah parts of this are really creepy, but it adds to that desolate, crying in a back alley feeling of the record. What an abrupt ending though! Ouch, that's a punch in the gut. Song of choice : "Besides Her" ...the opening is so spirited. -Andy Scheffler Elsewhere Complete website Published : March, 2005.