It’s even too hot to hate…
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[5.12]
Jonathan Bogart: The only thing I know about Motion City Soundtrack is that their drummer isn’t a very good player of the Leonard Maltin Game. From the sound of this, that’s all I ever need know.
[3]
Brad Shoup: Anyone want to wager on the average age of this page‘s editors? To treat honesty in kind, the sound is studded with personal landmarks: the yelping vocals beloved by a college girlfriend, sense of structure that had me thinking for a chunk of freshman year that Jimmy Eat World were a pop juggernaut, the near-subliminal Jars of Clay cello. “Do you ever wonder how you got to here,” MCS ask, all but posting the open call for junior high pics on a YouTube channel. The “time/timing” sentiment achieves a congruency of sentiment and hookiness; the unresolved chord at the end a sly move. Boosted a point because this is a fine substitute for Facebook trawling.
[7]
Jer Fairall: Post-twentysomething angst done with rather astonishing grace and prettiness, like Jimmy Eat World with a more flexible and folk-singery vocalist (trying to place what this reminded me of, my mind went more than once to Canadian Celtic-rockers Spirit Of The West). The dexterous way with which the singer winds through the lyric gives enough noble weight to the words that the sentiment is definitely felt; squint hard enough and begin to recognize “it’s not a matter of time / it’s just a matter of timing” as the great tragedy of many of our lives. The music feels produced to fit right in with a gentler era’s notion of “radio friendly,” stacked with humming synths, stately string-like washes and shimmering acoustics, but the band has the good sense to go for a late-in-the-game thrash-n-yell break to keep things from getting overly maudlin.
[8]
Anthony Easton: I am amused and entertained by some of this — I like the small details, the discovering sex at seventeen, with its shades of Janis Ian, for example — but it often collapses into cliche (wild horses), and the nonce chorus with the Blink-182 guitar work blasts the whole mess into irrelevance.
[4]
Patrick St. Michel: It’s easy to forgive the high-school-yearbook-quote theme of this song because Justin Pierre’s lyrics manage to be more than an ode to wild youth, just as interested in wasted time as “teenage girls.” It’s harder to forgive Pierre’s singing, which sounds great when he’s spazzing out (see “Everything Is Alright“) but isn’t built for delivering something meant to be “deep.”
[5]
Will Adams: When I was fourteen, I wrote a song that actually had the lyric “You don’t know what I feel/you can’t tell if it’s real.” I’m still rather upset with myself for having the gall to ever think that was an acceptable line, but when I came across this drivel, I felt a lot better. At least when I needled at my audience, I wasn’t pondering an obvious question — “Do you ever wonder how you got to here?” — as if I were lying on a lawn and gazing at the stars, man. Nor did I gank the first verse of “We Are Young” to run through my life events as if I were reading a shopping list.
[4]
Alfred Soto: The martial rolls and the high chorus harmonies are the kind of tough-sweet filigrees that you can expect to grace a song with Fountains of Wayne chord progressions and vocals with tips of the hat to indie rock and discovering girls and self-esteem at seventeen. No observation or judgment, much less detachment: a bunch of cool dudes recording their diaries.
[5]
Sabina Tang: 1) Like a latter-day James Cameron movie: no single line escapes cliché, but by dint of hard work the paragraph achieves coherency. 2) A few years ago, U2 brought their 360 tour to the former horse racetrack behind my parents’ house. After an hour of greatest hits from her bedroom window, my mother (who had no idea who U2 were) said: “I can recognize this band now! The guitarist always goes dwee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee-dee.” She’s right, too — that sound ought to be more distinctive than it is in these degenerate days.
[5]