3 Pill Morning’s new album Black Tie Love Affair is a great business card for these guys. It blows Take Control out of existence and gives these guys what is hopefully a great start in the modern rock world. The songs on the album were all written and rewritten well enough to the point to where they’re perfect from millisecond to millisecond and the production done by Jon King is about as good as it gets for this genre of music. There are flaws, but yes overall it’s a decent piece of work.
3 Pill’s sophomore album and their label debut is solid because of the songwriting. There’s not a quality that stands out more than that one. You can go through this album, song after song, time after time and never find a note or a word out of place. The songwriting here is outstanding.
The production on the album is good too but it doesn’t stand out as much as the songwriting. 3 Pill Morning’s lead vocalist, Jeff Stebbins has a great voice. But it’s also a little thin in the studio environment for this genre of music. 95% of the time, his voice sounds brilliant. But there’s an off putting moment occasionally on the album where it just doesn’t deliver a needed edge. This might have been fixed with a light flange on the vocal, maybe not. The good news is it’s nothing that’s going to have a lasting impact in a live environment and it’s not anything that won’t be fixed as Stebbins gets better performing every night. He’s good on this album, he’ll be amazing on the next one. That small quip and perhaps a better utilization of some space on a few songs are the only checks that this one gets for the record it is.
3 Pill Morning’s new album is going to take them to a new level. It’s not going to take them up ten levels but it’s going to take them to a new level. They’ve made a record with producer Jon King that they should be able to be on the road promoting for a couple of years, and that’s one of the main goals with any album. The attention to the craft of songwriting is appreciated and Jon King knows how to record modern rock guitars- he’s got that down. If you love mainstream and modern rock, you will want to pick up this album.