Silent Drive

Silent Drive fancy themselves as a sort of genre-bending answer to contemporary indie rock, and in many respects, they weren’t just pulling this label out of the shorts of some slick PR man in a Jet t-shirt. Their debut album, Love is Worth It, boils over with promise song after song.

From the first track, “4/16,” it is clear that Silent Drive also fancy themselves the second coming of Faith No More. The band certainly posses the severely underrated musicianship of that now-defunct outfit, with Zach Jordan supplying Mike Patton-like chops, especially on cuts like “The Professional,” “Our Lady of the Worthless Miracle” and “Henpecked.” Even the piano of “Broken Hearts Club” is reminiscent of some later, more progressive FNM cuts.

At this point, you might be deciphering Silent Drive as a one-trick pony. A quick first listen of Love Is Worth It might also afford you the same conclusion. You’d be wrong, however.

Silent Drive is not afraid to swerve onto the melodic lane of their hard-rock highway. “The Punch” sounds like a Red Hot Chili Peppers outtake from the Californication sessions, while “Davey Crockett” and “Boyfriend Notes” are radio-friendly Hoobastank-and-Incubus-influenced singles if I’ve ever heard them. Although initially these might sound like harsh indictments of the band, they aren’t intended as such.

There is an underlying creativity and earnestness of Silent Drive that only comes from the independent nature of Love is Worth It. Although their work recalls the comparisons of contemporaries like Limp Bizkit, Linkin Park and (shudder) Evanescence, they fall just short of sounding like carbon-copies of these bands. Presumably, they’ve had lots of time to work on this first batch of songs, and as such only time will tell if the hunger that is so apparent on their first release will manifest into years of creativity and record sales.

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