Arbo
Whirlington Sessions (EP) (2002)

review by: Dustin Pangonis
Date: 2/3/03

Music that is completely innovative or challenging is often praised by the music press. But sometimes, a catchy song with some great hooks is all you're after. My favorite bands may be off-the-wall indie rockers, but I've also got a pair of Lit CDs and a few frequently borrowed Everclear albums sitting around my room.

Where am I going with this? Well, I've got this "Whirlington Sessions" EP from a Chicago-based band called Arbo in front of me. It's not a bad set of songs, but I can't help but feel that most of it would sound great in the middle of a forty minute music marathon between Matchbox Twenty and Third Eye Blind. But is that a really bad thing?

With the opener, "Let's Go Again", Arbo give us their best song right off the bat. The song heavily suggests the Foo Fighters with it's powerful drums, feedbacked intro, and most of all, Dave Grohl soundalike vocals. The resemblance is so uncanny it overstates the link for the rest of the songs, which aren't so blatant. With the roundabout chorus of "Get it and get out/Get it and get out/Get it and get out/And you'll know my name" and the driving rock tempo, the EP sets the bar pretty high for the rest of the EP. (Carrying along the Foo parallel, this song probably beats most of the tunes off the dismal "One by One".)

From there, the album quiets down considerably, with "Coming Along", the first of three softer songs. By softer, I mean it starts out with clean/acoustic guitars and THEN hits the distortion, kind of distilling the impact. The band also slides into a less definable pop-rock sound, recalling lots of bands but not coming off as too derivative.

"Coming Along" also shows the band's more upbeat attitude, highlighted by some of the darker contemporaries in recent rock memory. "You can only take so much of bands complaining about their screwed up childhoods, how they were picked on as a kid and how daddy didn't love them," lead songwriter Tom Wilbeck states in the band's press kit, "It's ridiculous and overdone." And indeed, lines like "And hear 'em all sing our song/See the skies are now clear blue" show a band unafraid to smile.

But after that, the band loses some momentum with the uninspired rocker "Spitfire" and the acoustic based "If It's Too Late". They pick it up with the album's other bookend "While We're Young", which follows the quiet-into-distortion formula of the other songs, but in a more natural way. Quieter distortion comes in under the ringing acoustic intro, and the album ends with the best of the softer numbers.

Ultimately, it's hard to tell where Arbo will go from here. A five song EP full of killer tracks would have promised a strong album, but the band falters in the middle. But the highlights are good enough to show they know how to throw together a catchy song, and a great album may be ready after a little more time and experience. And anyone looking for a more upbeat alternative to some of today's rock will find plenty to appreciate in Arbo's debut EP.