The Promise Ring: Wood/Water : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

In order to save themselves, emo figureheads the Promise Ring have slowed their roll. Wood/Water, their first on Epitaph Records, is less blatantly melodic, peppy and cloying than their three albums on scene-making label Jade Tree. The best moments here are two wide-open sheafs of earnest guitar pop: "My Life Is at Home" and the spare "Half Year Sun," on which singer-songwriter Davey von Bohlen is lonely and rambling, self-doubting and a mite deranged. Capturing the impossibility of clean romantic breaks, he eerily declaims, "At the base of your skull, I've got a place there still." But the real relationship that's in trouble here is the one the group has with the genre it once represented so fiercely. As a result, "Get on the Floor" and "Stop Playing Guitar" are wistful remembrances, music about music-making. "In a second life, I'd never become a singer," von Bohlen confesses. "They've all gone mad, sad and angry." True, but that's where all the beauty comes from.

JON CARAMANICA
(RS 895 - May 9, 2002)