Brevity, a poet once said, is the soul of wit.

Unfortunately, EMPIRE! EMPIRE! (I WAS A LONELY ESTATE) never learned the lesson. They play a sprawling sort of emo, like their labelmates in CASTEVETS or Suburban Home/Tiny Engines’ LOOK MEXICO that seems hellbent on stuffing every single idea they had in that key into the song. Sometimes it works out. Sometimes, like in “It Happened Because You Left”, it just. keeps. going.

I have a tolerance for this stuff, hell, one of my favorite bands is ENVY, but on a “first” full length, EMPIRE! EMPIRE! come to the saturation point pretty quickly. Vocalist Keith Lantinen has a great voice for the genre, though it’s used a little too rough here. He emotes the appropriate “emo” range from the high school choir voice to something more hopeless.

The final track, “An Idea Is A Greater Monument Than A Cathedral,” is a great example of this “every idea into the song” mentality. It goes for about five minutes, has an outro fadeout that leads, you guessed it, to another outro. When I first finished the record and heard that switcheroo, my first response was, yeah, it should have ended 40 seconds ago. That was a nice ending.

The art itself is another example of using all the space available, with no desire to leave anything on the floor. Almost every square inch of the booklet that is not the lyrics is stuffed with something. The art on the spine even has jokes.

For a record that was self-produced, it didn’t turn out badly, as it seems reasonably well balanced, and little is buried, but I feel like it would benefit EMPIRE! EMPIRE! tremendously to have had a real producer look over their shoulder. The difference between good and great is often what you decide to leave out and I guess it bodes well that the lesson the band needs to learn next is to pare down its roaming ideas.

Count Your Lucky Stars / MySpace