Band:	Fair To Midland
Album:	Fables From A Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times Is True
Style:	Alternative metal, Progressive metal
Release date:	June 2007

01. Dance Of The Manatee
02. Kyla Cries Cologne / Pre-Versa
03. Vice/Versa
04. The Wife, The Kids, And The White Picket Fence
05. April Fools And Eggmen / Ciperion
06. A Seafarer's Knot
07. A Wolf Descends Upon The Spanish Sahara
08. Walls Of Jericho
09. Tall Tales Taste Like Sour Grapes
10. Upgrade^Brigade / When The Bough Breaks
11. Say When / Ozymandius
12. An Honest Con Man [ bonus]

"Why have I not heard of Fair To Midland before?"
"Where have you been all my life?"

The questions posed by Susan in her Arrows & Anchors review continue to reverberate in my head. In fact, I still can't understand why Fair To Midland is so unknown, despite releasing quality stuff since 2002.

As soon as I listened to them for the first time, I started to think about what genre they belonged. Neo-progressive? Altenative, math? Folk, hardcore? System Of A Down-ish? Then I realized that, if I wanted to assign them a genre, I had to invent one. In fact, the Texan combo play a variegated mixture of all these genres, and more, without making it sound far-fetched. On the contrary, their playing seems extremely natural, and the feeling between the five members firm.

Fables From A Mayfly: What I Tell You Three Times Is True is an album that really should catch the attention of every metal fan, since it contains lot of the fundamentals of the various styles: from harsh screams to quiet, melodic, singing, from great old-style riffs to emo-like (see "The Wife, The Kids, And The White Picket Fence") fascinating melodies. It is part of the new generation of prog releases that take a really short time to get into, since every song is characterized by great approachability and one track leads to the other, forming a chain from which it is difficult to break away. But this doesn't absolutely mean this album can be taken lightly. It's all the opposite. Every song deals with a challenging theme, and this band valorizes something that seems to have been forgotten: great lyrics.

In fact Fair To Midland, as well as playing fabulous music, always tries to transmit a message, hidden in complex metaphors and medieval atmospheres, and they do that so well.

The whole album, in all its completeness, slips away too fast, sounding like a 20-minute release, because of the involvement it causes in the listener, but the replay never seems a boring chance, and every listen brings to attention a particular, a feature, that does nothing but enrich the listening experience.

Fair To Midland are still a young band, with solid awareness of their possibilities. It's difficult, because of their characterizing originality, to gauge in which direction will they choose to go, but every experimentation they will undertake, it is nearly impossible to think that it will be something disappointing.