Review Summary: Breathe Carolina creates a cd filled with musical cliches, lyrics that could have been written by a 15 year old girl, and instrumentation that hardly qualifies as music.
Lets face it, with the lyric writing maturity of pre-pubescent boys and the musical talent of whatever the extent of the new Garage Band program can give them, Breathe Carolina have come onto the “16-year-old-scene-girl” scene with the subtlety of an elephant. A necessary question: “Is ‘Hello Fascination’ as bad as the other bands (BrokenCYDE) in this hopeless genre of screaming and auto tune?” The answer: a resounding NO, but the end result is still pretty terrible.
The first song, also the title track, is a foreboding example of things to come. The song starts with some kind of guitar with so many effects that it is nearly unrecognizable. The song moves into a very standard synth and extremely poppy beat that sounds straight out of a Brittany Spears cd. To make matters worse, the song features a breakdown filled with the same unrecognizable guitar and some strange attempt at drums that uses the same crash cymbal the whole 15 seconds It is featured.
The second song, “I’m the Type of Person to Take Things Personal” features more of a trance synth feel with echo-ey clean vocals from David and the same, one note, generic scream from Kyle which features the ever-mature line “ You better use your head before we take it off your mother fu**ing shoulders.” The song ends with a trance beat into the next song, “Take Me to Infinity.”
“Take Me to Infinity” features that very line at least 4 times per verse, which can certainly grate on a reviewer’s eardrums after hearing the full song several times. Once again the guitar-that-probably-isn’t-guitar is featured in the background, and one of the most bothersome things about this song is that in one part, it actually has Kyle and David talking about what they are going to do after they record for the day, which actually just feels insulting.
Moving on to “Dressed Up to Undress,” this is quite possibly one of the worst written choruses I have ever heard with the same uninspired music. The chorus is as follows: “Why you dressing up tonight, we don’t need money to kill the lights, and why you talkin’ over it, I don’t words to feel those lips, and why you talkin’ over it, everything we want is in our grips, it seems to me, that we should be, dressed up to undress.”
Track 5 is “I.D.G.A.F.” Again, this song sounds as if it was penned by a certain hotel heiress rather then two grown men. The chorus features incomprehensibly fast robotic vocals and David saying he doesn’t give a fu*k, and nothing else. Once again amongst the drivel of synth and computerized noises, the guitar, if you can call it that, is present.
“Welcome to Savannah” is the next track and is actually one of the better songs, especially when compared with “I.D.G.A.F.” The song features all electronic instrumentation with almost all clean vocals. There is screaming, but it is so edited and broken up that it can hardly be called screaming at all.
After the fairly normal “Welcome to Savannah,” we get treated to the incredibly immature, borderline stalker lyrics of “I Have to Go Return Some Video Tapes.” The song features heavy screaming, and whiny clean vocals, along with literally one synth sound, and little variation. The lyrics contain gems such as, “I want you to know, I’ve been in your apartment.”
“The Dressing Room” is track 8 and as you can guess, it’s about women, dressing rooms, and not remembering their names. It sounds identical to every other song on here; it actually becomes comical how similar and undifferentiated this song is compared to every other one.
“Tripped and Fell in Portland” is the next song and has the most actual instrumentation. It sounds like every other generic pop/rock band ever, which is actually a step up in technicality of music. But wait! There’s more! This particular song has an acoustic, slow moving ending as the last minute.
Track 10 is “Can I Take You Home?” As if correlation between song and title were mandatory, this song is about taking a girl home, sorry to ruin the surprise for anyone. And guess what else? The melodic side is once again the same sugary, synth heavy music that runs this cd.
If the song title reflects on the lyrics of this song, which they do in this cd, then you should be very frightened by “My Obsession.” This is easily the most boring song on the cd and features almost recycled lyrical ideas from “I Have to Go Return Some Video Tapes.”
The second to last song “Velvet,” is the same thing as every other song on the cd, and sounds as if it belongs on a pop diva’s cd rather than a record written by two males. Lastly, “Rescue,” actually sounds very different, for the worse. It features guitar that isn’t even playing chords, but single notes. This song actually sounds like it was thrown together at the last second as a filler track. It has very little melody and just isn’t good by any stretch of the mind.
So is this cd the redemption of Breathe Carolina? No, but will it meet the expectations of every scenester on the planet? Of course! It’s Breathe Carolina.
The Album Stream is now on the Breathe Carolina Myspace
http://www.myspace.com/breathecarolina
