There are a fair few bands with the name Rumour Has It. I know because it took me more than five minutes to find the right one. I never get why bands are so fucking lazy they can’t be arsed to Google their prospective name to just check it won’t confuse people. If a band from Outer Mongolia share your name, well, fair enough. But I found at least two from the US and another from the UK. Band name fail.
Anyway, this particular version of Rumour Has It play a brand of pop-punk that really needs an identity. There are riffs a bit like Four Year Strong, there’s All Time Low three-way vocals, acoustic songs…it’s like a bag of pic’n’mix. And not in a good way. First up, the vocalist isn’t convincing enough. If you’re a pop-punk band you need songs with hooks large enough to land a whale and a singer who can stamp his name on a song and own the stage. There are glimpses of this on the EP, but the band aren’t consistent enough with either. It’s not that the vocalist can’t sing, he just doesn’t sound like he means it. It’s a bit, well, weak.
On top of that the songs sound a bit all over the place. The way the lead vocals fade out on ‘Huckleberry Snooze’ is just absolutely dreadful and should never have been allowed to happen. And that happens a fair bit – there are moments in songs where you think ‘did that really just happen?’ My advice would be to get the singer to have vocal lessons and tighten up his voice and make it stronger and more convincing. The band themselves also need to decide what type of band they are and then stick to it. Are they FYS? Are they ATL? Are they something different? Rumour Has It aren’t a million miles away, but they need to grab an identity before they can go much further.