The Beat Surrender

Fruits Of The Forest is a self released EP from MPD. This is one of the most frustrating EP’s I have ever reviewed, I must have changed my mind about whether I liked it or not dozens of times. I think I will have to go with, you will either love it or hate it or like me love it and hate all at the same time.

Not sure what music genre this fits into, its melodic, acoustic rock with lots of other influences thrown in for good measure.

The first track Electrical for me is the weaker one from the EP, vocals very quiet, the strings and acoustic guitar don’t really seem to blend with the noisy electric guitar. Next track is The First Time, very very long intro, weak vocals to start but the melodies and the quiet guitar riffs soon overcome this, the overall feeling of this track was for me like a lot of the really good stuff Embrace put out in their early days.

Last track Refrain again had the long intro, high-pitched vocals this time. The overriding feeling for me is that this guy is trying really hard to recreate the anthemic qualities of the bands of the early 90’s like Embrace, Oasis, and The Verve etc. The pity for me is that this has already been done.

The writing is quite good and if the tracks had been that little bit shorter, I think I would have appreciated the music more. A good pop song shouldn’t really be longer than 3mins and these were 5.02, 4.14 and 5.40, way too long.

There is something strangely addictive about MPD, can’t quite put my finger on what it is but while I don’t see him attracting hoards of fans I can imaging a small but faithful few will absolutely love him.