Goodbye Blue Monday - Help Is on the Way

Goodbye Blue Monday
Help Is On the Way
Loud and Clear Records
Grade: A-

This is a sneakily good record by Goodbye Blue Monday. Coming out of the oddly exceptional music basin of San Diego, Goodbye Blue Monday smoke out some of the best instrumental-inspired rock that I’ve heard in a long ass time. After releasing their debut full-length Next Time We Stop Breathing in 2003, GBM replaced guitarist Andrew Trecha with former Dropscience Demetrius Antuna. Antuna joined the already solid Matt Mournian on guitar and vocals, Jason Hooper on drums and later Dario Izarraras on bass. What makes the band particularly special across the seven tracks on Help Is On the Way is an amazing gift to push out expansive instrumental guitar rock, but with a near perfect mix of Mournian’s vocals to take them over the edge. Typically, when majority instrumental bands add vocals a small minority of the time, it sounds forced and ill-conceived. Mournian’s pitched, Bono-like vocals sound perfectly situated to fulfill the promise of ethereal bliss the layered guitars provide. A characteristic instance of this comes from the title track where the guitars are intertwining and echoing, while Mournian belts the line “Help is on the way.” Such revelations though are not confined to this single track and are equally spread across the other six – particularly “This is Your Four Leaf Clover” and “The Last of the Golden Palominos.” Indeed latched into San Diego bricklayers the Album Leaf, Pinback and the Black Heart Procession, GBM is probably the least-known brilliant act out of the area. Yet, that is unlikely to last very long given Help Is On the Way.