Review Summary: Back when scene kid music at least sounded good, if not anything else.
I'm just going to say this now: this is an objectively bad album.
Like most people here giving this a positive review, I was introduced to this album/band as an angst-ridden child in my early teenage years. However, my memories of this album do not include crying to
Ohio Is for Lovers after I got rejected, or anything that would fall under the "stupid emo kid" stereotype.
Hawthorne Heights was just another band I listened to--there was no emotional attachment to the music, like "stupid emo kids" like to talk about. When I first heard this album, I was not jaded from reading reviews before listening to an album, so I listened without bias, and guess what? I liked what I heard.
Even now, when I've moved onto "real music", as many reviewers call anything that wasn't popular with kids below the age of 16, I can still enjoy 9 out of the 11 songs on this album on occasion. The two excluded tracks are
Blue Burns Orange and
Speeding Up the Octaves. All of the others, however,
sound very good, although I will admit that they all follow the same "generic emo music" formula.
Enough gushing about how much I personally enjoyed the album, though. It's time to look at it through a more objective eye, and as I said in the beginning of this review, this is not a good album if you look at it that way. The musicianship is solid but not "good." The members are probably incapable of playing anything remotely technical, but they can play this "safe" music quite nicely. The lyrics are cringe-worthy, especially
Niki FM:
"I'm outside of your window with my radio. You are the only station; you play the song I know." That excerpt does nothing but remind me of the days when everyone thought that a cheesy note in a locker was a good way to pick up chicks. As for innovation, there is nothing new brought forth in this album. Nothing.
Hawthorne Heights are not an original band, and that's all there is to say about it.
Being a math geek, I'll rate this with a formula. If you take the derivative of the album length and substitute it into the function f(x) =...I'm obviously kidding, but bad jokes aside:
Musicianship - 30% - 2.0
Innovation - 30% - 1.0
Sound - 40% - 4.5
= 2.7, which will be rounded down to a 2.5 because of how god-awful the lyrics are.
This might be a bad album, but if you can ignore the public opinion on something, you might find a guilty pleasure.
The Silence In Black And White is my guilty pleasure.
