LipstickStains

A Goodbye Letter to You

The beginning of this beautiful, 54 second instrumental holds true to its name as we can hear the good bye letter being written in the background. While it is a short intro into the album I actually love what they did with this space. I think the strings in this song are absolutely stunning to listen to and the build at the end feels very 2000’s pop punk/midwestern emo.

The Kiss of Death

There is so much production that went into this album and I think that’s one reason why I wanted to write about it. This song in particular has some of my favorite mixing I’ve heard out of FountiT. 

We start with a large, heavy intro that leads us into the emo boy vocals I love so much. One qualm, I do have, is Jordan’s lack of enunciation in some parts throughout the album. I think his patrick stump-esque vocals can sometimes lean too far in that direction giving him the same issue I frequently find in Fall Out Boy, I can’t understand what they’re saying. As a girl who loves song writing, and especially lyricism, this is disappointing because I’d love to know what story is at play.

One part I had no trouble understanding, and was grateful I didn’t, was the chorus. This whole album has next level lyricism but “Grey matter splashed around her” is absolute poetry. I love this line and I love this chorus.

The song gets a bit peppier as we near the mid way mark with a two step beat that I will never not appreciate.  

The last third-ish of this song is probably my favorite part. The first thing that caught my attention was the vocals dropping to background vocals, this effect sounded amazing and they did such a great job pulling this off in the studio. Which brings me to a point I have for their new sound in general, I love the harmonies on this album. I’m not sure who all is included in the harmonizing, but their voice mixed with Jordans is absolutely beautiful.

Towards the end of this song we get more Stumpian style vocals which lead us to an amazing high note from J. My jaw literally dropped when I heard him hit this and once you listen, you’ll understand why.

The fade out from this song is fun, sounding like an old record on a player. I love when songs have fun with background sounds and foley, and on this album, the boys definitely did.

I Found it Sucks to be Friends With The Guys in Found It

This is my favorite song on the album, it’s fun and upbeat while still holding some angst. It’s how I wish to be seen.

It opens with a workaholics intro, a show (?) I know absolutely nothing about. I could google it, but what’s the fun in that? The sound clip is funny without any context to what the scene is so I think they picked a good one.

I really love the Three Cheers for Sweet revenge style vocals we get in this song. I love how they played around with the sound of so much 2000s emo and made it not only cohesive, but a great new sound. They recently got announced as a band for an emo prom and I think that really makes perfect sense for this new album.

One thing I love about this whole album, but this song in particular, is the live guitar. I love the sound of fingers sliding on strings and the reverberation that happens after a strum. I’m really happy they opted for live instruments. I honestly can’t tell if the drums were live but I can tell that it was written by a drummer. There’s a certain way drummers will think to compose things that non-drummers often don’t think of. On this album I can tell a lot of love went into the drums.

In the chorus we get more of that emo mixtape feel with the early Panic! lyricism. Honestly I could just be making this up but “Dancing on the fine line, living on the edge. This is just how my brain works. Tap tap tapping to the rhythm in my head.” sounds like something Brendon Urie wrote at 18.

The little clap clap at about the midway point is now something I live for; as I mentioned, I love when songs play with other sounds and I think this was a fun thing to add in.

But I Don’t Speak Italian!

I think this album has a bit more metalcore influence than FoundiT’s usual sound. I really love the heavier guitar that they’ve been bringing in for these angsty, sometimes angry songs.

In this song we get some insight into what might’ve happened between the author and the person they’re writing the goodbye letter to, or perhaps just one of the many people they’re writing to. Jordan sings about taking this person everywhere and how they let him go and he fell. We can assume this person wasn’t there for the author in their time of need. 

In the bridge we slow down a bit, we see the author returning back to old ways that may not be healthy for them. The instrumentals in this portion are, dare I say, sexy. This is a far sexier bridge than Taylor Swift has ever written and I mean that with all love and respect to her. Needless to say, I love this part of the song.

Summer Bummer

Yes, I love this song. Yes, I’m a stoner. I can’t say for sure that those things correlate but I feel like they might. I think this song perfectly embodies that summer freedom and partying feeling. The music is bouncy and the lyrics are fun but still have aggression to them. I especially love the line ”I’ll write my stupid songs, if you don’t want them about you, don’t piss me off.” It reminds me of Sabrina’s line in Please Please Please “If you don’t want to cry to my music, don’t make me hate you prolifically.”

This was the first released, and second single of this album. I think that was a great choice to make because this song is so loud and fun and danceable that it sticks out so well by itself.

Tangled

This is an outro to Summer Bummer but again I just have to say how much I love the harmonizing on this album and I’m so happy they dedicated space to showing it off.

My Life was Written as a Tragedy

For the final song we slow it down quite a bit, again very reminiscent of early MCR. I really love the drum build in the first verse going into the more aggressive vocals. 

The background screams that start at about the minute mark are so good and add so much depth to this song. Although, I am just a sucker for gnarly screams

I really love the chorus, I love the bounce it has at the very end followed by the more aggressive vocals and a return of the background screams. 

The drums in this song are definitely some of my favorites. I love how fast and aggressive they are and just how much production went into them. This is definitely one of those songs where you can tell how much care went into how they sounded.

The song and effectively, album lead out with some more screaming over slow, tempoed instrumentals that carry us the rest of the way out.

Overall I think this album is fun, beautiful, angry, and raw. I think this is FoundiT’s best work yet and I’m so excited to see this performance live.