Hawthorne Heights "The Silence in Black and White" CD
[Victory]
Hey, awesome, Thursday jumped ship to a major label, so Victory signed another band that's trying to sound just like Thursday! (Sarcasm.) Seriously, this sounds like Thursday... but worse. Why? Because the songs are poppier, less thoughtful, and just not that good. It's the same old radio tinged emo/screamo stuff with a mix of clean and distorted guitars, singing and screaming vocals, blah, blah, blah. Don't get me wrong, I love this stuff when it's done right, I don't care. But the fact of the matter is this is a weak ass CD. The vocals are mixed so loud that I can barely take it, the "heavy" guitar tone is really thin and powerless, the songwriting is generic but very flawed, so rather than being catchy or emotional it's just boring and aimless, etc. The clean parts suck, and yet for some reason they're stuck on putting them all over the place, and the distorted parts aren't really that good either... there's just no fuckin' energy here at all. The calmer singing's not that bad, but the whinier high-end singing sucks, and the screaming drives me fuckin' nuts. The tempos are also totally bland. It's all the same midpaced rhythm with no real change of pace, and when they do speed up slightly, they play with so little effort or emotion that it still feels flat and lifeless. I mean, god damn, any CD of this nature should have at least one track on the first half that makes you wanna sing along. Not so with this one. Fuck, there's not one good song on this damn thing! Every now and then I'm like, "Oh, wait, here we go... this part's not bad... oh, wait, nope, never mind, they're sucking again." The layout's alright, nothing too interesting, but it looks decent and everything is plainly presented without any problems. I'm not a fan of the lyrics strictly because even at a cursory glance the personal tomes rely on shitloads of derivative phrases and metaphors - blades, throat cutting, bleeding, flying, fire, blah, blah. It's nothing new and doesn't really say much to me at all. This band stinks. God damn... they're like a third-rate (at best) combination of a bunch of other Victory bands, except the other bands (I'm talking Thursday, Spitalfield, and Taking Back Sunday) are actually really good, whereas these kids are just going through the motions. If this band gets really popular there's something totally wrong with the world today. So... yeah... I'm pretty sure they're gonna get really popular. This is fucking terrible. "Speeding Up the Octaves" is one of the worst songs I've heard this year. Why the hell did this band get signed? (2/10)
Running time - 42:55, Tracks: 11
[Notable tracks: every song is weak as hell]
Victory Records - http://www.victoryrecords.com

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