Thursday, August 17, 2006

A Heartwell Ending - Trust Us We Lie CD Review

There are some days where I would like to take each member of Taking Back Sunday out to a shady corner of North Dakota and shoot them one by one in the head. It would be a Herculean task to count the number of sad, uninspired, rip-off bands they inspired in the wake of the popularity of Tell All Your Friends, as well as the glut of bands still aping that sound. It wouldn’t have been nearly so bad if at least a few of their clones had come out ok, but nearly every one of them came out with the retarded gene influencing every song they wrote. It was like the fifth clone of Michael Keaton from Multiplicity spawned out over and over again.

So without further adieu, I present to you the world’s latest Taking Back Sunday cover band… err, I mean emocore band… wait, maybe mallcore? Or how about we just call it borecore? Or crapcore? Or maybe just unneeded and unwanted? Whatever you want to call it, Trust Us We Lie isn’t much more than a mash up of Taking Back Sunday, Scary Kids Scaring Kids, a vocoder, Fall Out Boy song titles, slightly out of tune singing, and some Emery flourishes for good measure.

If the previous sentence didn’t scream out to you how “scene” these guys want to be than I think you need to wake the hell up, go visit Hot Topic, and catch up on what’s cool with the kiddies today. Sadly, to be cool in today’s Hot Topic and MySpace musical scene a band has to sacrifice all of their integrity, dress up in clothes meant for the the sex lacking a penis, and whore themselves out by making millions of friend requests online. At least that's what A Heartwell Ending did.

Ok, not everything on this disc is utterly terrible. It’s more so boring and run of the mill as opposed to terrible, but in the music industry aren’t those two things almost interchangeable? These guys can, in a pinch, write a chorus that is infectious and not completely eye-rollingly bad, but it is the exception instead of the rule when listening to this effort. Also, the production values are quite good, but then again, what band doesn’t have a nice, glossy CD to put on the shelves today? It’s actually the rarer occurrence to have a CD without pristine production values than the other way around. But anyways.

Where does this leave a band like A Heartwell Ending? Pretty much in nowheresville. Surely this release will get picked up by a decent subset of the scene kids, but beyond that, Trust Us We Lie holds no real redeeming value. It’s another “hot for 5 minutes and then fade into nothingness” releases that we see littering the shelves of Hot Topic and Best Buy. Whatever. It’s your money, not mine, but I can tell you I wouldn’t spend a dime on this.

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