Review Summary: You look good from the outside, but I know you're not cool
Okay. So you can see the cover art to Allstar Weekend’s
Suddenly to the right of your screen: four guys standing fairly, well, differently in terms of their individual stances. Zachary Porter – second from the left - has this frontman-ish-ness, confident thing going for him in this picture: the ladies man, singer, poster boy advertisement for the band and the whole deal - you get the general idea. Next on the singer’s left, the rocking guitarist, a.k.a. Nathan Darmody, is not too far behind Porter in terms of a display of dashing qualities, even posing a slant with his shoulder blades like all the
cool models like to do – he plays the
ax after all. I suppose he should be able to pull off the whole chill and determined look kind of decently. Then you have the other two guys on the far left and right: Michael the drummer and bassist Cameron Quiseng, together the
follow-a-longs as I call them. They’re not too distracting, other than not looking - or at least trying to be –
cool like the other guys. Props for them.
As you can see, just by looking at the album art for
Suddenly you can predict and assume a lot about Allstar Weekend correctly without any prior research. Other than band dynamics and individual roles, they’re all pretty young – mid to late teens – and the music they create is most likely about teenage matters, which it actually is: i.e. girls, parties, and getting somewhere in life. You can also take a shot at who their target audience might be, right?
Disney-like mobs in all the available forms; that was an easy one, given their poses, clothing, and ages – not to mention the cover is
easily something the
Jonas Brothers might put on one of their albums. A quick look at my info sheet, and, well, what do you know? All Star Weekend already have a single that’s topped
Radio Disney’s Top 30, the electrifying-glitz pop of “A Different Side of Me”. So far, so good - place a checkmark next to the audience hypothesis, and that brings us to what the band’s music actually sounds like.
Well, it’s got to be poppy in some way, because, you know, chart topping singles speak of some degree of commercial mentality (most of the time), and I bet Porter has a really
sweet voice to him, something that exposes the hooks of the songs and brings in the tweenies with ease. The instrumental aspect of the band is probably not too technical I imagine, maybe with some freakin’ awesome poppy synths and electronic effects thrown in if “A Different Side of Me” is of any indication of what we’ll hear on
Suddenly; but I'm sure that we’ll find nothing like drum or guitar solos, much less interesting time signatures. Yes, I’m thinking this is probably seven songs of predictable and mindless radio pop, something like a pinpoint accurate cross hybrid between
Jonas Brothers and
Metro Station (uh oh) - and we all know what that means: the audience that Allstar Weekend sing to will eat this up, and that’s fine, as its easily marketable with its hook-chorus galore and tweenage-identifiable, painfully blunt lyrical topics. But to the rest of listeners, it’s brain-dead, derivative, and painfully nauseating, pretty much a classic case of “
Oh God! Not another one.”
You can get a pretty accurate idea of what you’ll be getting with Allstar Weekend just by looking at
Suddenly’s cover, that’s a pretty solid point right now, but I wouldn’t exactly trust the band themselves to give you a correct summary of their sound: they cite
Elton John,
LCD Soundsystem,
Bruce Springsteen, and
blink-182 as influences for
Suddenly . . . and, well, are you really being serious, guys?
Come on. No, this is just seven songs of
Metro Station-esque Disney pop-rock with all the fixings: lazy verses, attempts at soaring choruses, crystal-clean production values, electro-glitz effects – all tailored to a limited audience. It’s predictable right up to just a glance at its album cover, wouldn't you agree? And you need only to listen to one song from the album to get an overview of what you’ll hear all the way through. Porter said in an interview leading up to
Suddenly’s release that everything to be found in their music is something that their fans really connect with - and given the lyrical topics and poppy nature of the music, yes, I would agree with him. The targeted teens will love it, and
Radio Disney will devour it – but, guys,
guys, what about the rest of us?
