I Am Alaska

Any band who seemingly takes readily-present influences like Circa Survive, later This Day Forward and late At the Drive-In / early Mars Volta has the ability to produce something special and cathartic. Unfortunately for I Am Alaska, they merely treat their EP A Day in a Life so that it ends up a chaotic, disorientating and confused mish-mash of the aforementioned.

Opener "Proletariat" is certainly trying, ushering things in with restraint and a cooing vocalist, then transitioning later on into something substantially more energetic and stuttering; it does sound vaguely like Relationship of Command or In Response, but it also seems sort of clumsy and something else is generally amiss. The next track, "Death Is a Silent Picture," is mildly smoother in such a transition yet seems to prove I Am Alaska have to stick to a formula like such once in a while to make an impact.

"Get Real" has some seriously promising elements (the Cedric vocal aping at 1:13 is pretty sweet), but it straddles a line between queasy Mars Volta worship and smooth influence integration, too often falling into the former camp.

Give credit to I Am Alaska for at least having the right rearings and an ambitious story to go along with it, that being the narrative of a ghost trapped in another person's body. But don't give all the credit to them quite yet; that is, at least based on this anonymous ghost's Day in a Life.

STREAM
Get Real [ft. TDF's Mike Shaw]
Ghost