Black Lungs — Send Flowers

There's something missing from Send Flowers, the debut album from Wade MacNeil of Alexisonfire's Black Lungs side project. One gets the feeling that MacNeil is skirting around the main ideas in most of the disc's songs. "Fire And Brimstone" is a good mixture of Alexisonfire background shouts and delicate piano parts with lyrics about religious hypocrisy. "Timeless" and "These Moments Define Us" are both good combinations of punky power chord riffs and interesting vocal melodies. But many of Send Flowers' songs either end abruptly or veer off in a completely different direction, which is confusing and means they don't ever stick. At one point, the tone in MacNeil's voice and the end of the instrumentation on "When It's Blackout" make it seem like it's done, but then it starts up again, which seems redundant. Then there's "In Memory," which suffers from the opposite problem. It shouldn't have been the album's last track. You're expecting another song when it ends, only to discover that there isn't one. Had MacNeil explored his ideas a bit further instead of dancing around them, Send Flowers could have been much better.