Review Summary: If every song on this record left a color, there'd be a canvas of varying shades of orange and yellow. The album delivers happy, bright, and feel-good hooks but struggles to leave any sense of diversity in the song writing.
Half Hearted Hero are making a decent rumble in the underground music community. Their CD is a favorite among the thousands of listeners on the private music mega site What.CD and they do draw a large crowd locally, which is understandable given they're extremely groovy, ecstatic to be alive, and possessing just enough technicality to peak the prototypical musician's attention. It's an easy and formulaic way to explain this band's soon-to-happen success. The only problem in the equation is the songwriting talent.
The band has its hooks, and this is an undeniable sinking factor. I find myself singing along to It's Cool, but the Fullblast Did it Already (An homage to a primary influence of the band) and I tap my foot as best I can to match the amphetamine-driven blast beats that too well dominate this record. Bits and pieces of guitar leads stand out to me as showcasing potential gnar shredding abilities and even a few riffs show some more thought than just simple chords underneath simple melodies. The voice of the melodious Anthony Savino is smooth, comforting, radio friendly, and even slightly seductive. He pins each note so perfectly to the floor that there isn't a way to counter the inspiring choke hold of his lines, and with his young age, he stands to become a pop star if he makes the few correct calls it takes. But sadly enough, there's enough ego stroking going on in this paragraph now to last the band for two more records; the plague of this record here-in lies in the redundancy of it all.
There's little to differentiate each song from one other. You can easily pop the CD in and miss where one track ceases and another song starts. What happens is you begin to clasp onto the few hooks that matter to you, and as a result, you shut out a good portion of music that is honestly decent. The music is so overly mechanical in its construction that you get a fill, but for a 45 minute record, it's like eating 6 cheeseburgers.
The biggest problem I've found has to be the over-use of blast beats. HHH has a very technical percussion section, but it gets very annoying very quickly, and leaves me skipping songs or putting on another CD all together. The guitar solos featured on the album are overtly technical, and essentially abandon any sense of direction other than straight shredding that flops miserably at being either impressive or original. It's a shame given the band is capable of great choruses but isn't capable of great solos, and if the lead guitarist of the band (Either Clinton Lisboa or AJ Mills, their myspace doesn't specify) spent more time considering the necessities of a well-forged solo and less about gaining renown for technicality in a world maxed out with "Look, I can play so fast I defy gravity", they would have some killer tunes that would stump hordes of sweaty teenagers everywhere.
The final thoughts I have on this album are not harsh, however. The band is brimming with talent and I can see them playing Warped Tour easily in their careers. They just need to allot more time to constructing more ensnaring songs and using more diversity in their composition techniques. I feel a 3 is a bit of a generous rating, but because this record leaves the listener so inspired, driven, and overly-stimulated, it's excusable in this case.
