As insubstantial as snow on a radiator.
The American quintet’s second album is as poppy as ever; easy on the ear and full of melodic tunes with hooky riffs and catchy sing-along choruses at every turn. Tunes like ‘I Fancy Abroad’ have a bouncy danceable beat and plenty of vocal woah-woah’s in an attempt to get the melody stuck in your head for as long as possible, but unfortunately it doesn’t often work.
The album is wholly vacuous stuff though, so no matter how upbeat and catchy each tuneful aural assault is, by half way through the album it’s hard not to feel overloaded with naive lyrics, riffs that could almost be heavy but manage not to be and tunes that seem engineered to be as throwaway as humanly possible. The whole thing is like a more polished and commercial version of Busted, or even like a softer version of Alphabeat, it’s hard not to feel that you’re being forced to be cheerful through sheer force of will; they’ve even thoughtfully removed all the rough edges so you don’t injure yourself on anything.
'The End of an Error' has more than a smattering of emotional (almost)angst filled moments; the piano of ‘Behind the Gun’ makes a sweet ballad even sweeter and ‘Things are Happening’ seems to sum up the album; guitars and drums building constantly to peaks of saccharine emotion and clichéd lyrics. It would be easy to believe that we were still tightly in the grip of the emo era. Pop-rock never sounded so stale.
It’s very easy to feel jaded by albums like this because nothing seems real, the production is so tight that every note is cut short, every edge is softened and the angst feels like a lie told through Vaseline.