Review Summary: I was hoping this would be as good as the original line up and knew it wouldn't be. It's like triple-vanilla ice cream...which is exactly the same as vanilla ice cream.
I picked up Amber Pacific's debut album, The Possibility and the Promise a few years ago when I really started to get back into music. I liked it. A lot. It was good, hook heavy pop-punk and yes, Dango (the drummer) really is that good. I still listen to The Possibility and the Promise quite a bit.
But, like a lot of bands that never quite broke big, Amber Pacific seemed unable to keep it going. The ratings on Sputnik are a great example. Their debut album had 63 ratings. Their second release had 37. Virtues, their third release (and first on the Victory label) has, as of right now, five ratings. When Matt Young (lead vocals) departed after their 2nd album, I think the entire fan base knew that whatever came next, it wouldn't be the same and probably would be worse...and it was.
So Virtues comes out with new lead singer Jesse Cottam. It's still the same decently played pop-punk. Dango still kills it on drums, and now instead of overshadowing the rest of the band, he holds back enough to stay solid, without overwhelming the rest of the musicians. So why is this bad?
First, the song writing just fell off a damn cliff. There are twelve tracks on this CD, and from my interpretation of the lyrics, seven of them are about breaking up/bad relationships. I can dig that this is popular song writing topic but yeah, over 50% of the album is too much! The second track, "The Girl Who Destroys Worlds" starts to bring the cheese with this bit:
No matter how much the pain/you know I'll do it again and again until forever
I can't kick the habit/cause I just gotta have it
and by the track 11, "Something to be Said," we're still slogging through the comfortable misery of:
I can't guess why this is over/you wore me out straight to the core
And you're left falling harder/than you've ever felt before
Those tracks, sandwich five other bad relationship numbers, including "Three Words," "The Best Mistake," and "We Can't Fake This," plus two others.
I'll say this, beyond the actual lyrics, none of these songs by themselves are terrible. There wasn't any point in listening to the CD that I said "well, that was crap" but neither was there anything remotely memorable. I listened to Virtues on my brutal 90+ minute daily commute and even when trying to stay focused on the CD, I found myself constantly thinking about somethi...Arby's roast beef...Ashey Larry...dead possum in road...
Now, what were we talking about? Right. It's a pop-punk CD. Lots of hooks. Lots of pogo-dancing beats. Lots of sing along choruses. Lots of what people expect from pop-punk, and nothing that stands out. The first track, "Anthem For the Young at Heart" is an upbeat youth anthem (slash) love song. Track two, the aforementioned "Girl Who Destroys Worlds" is an upbeat bad relationship song. Track three, "Three Words" is somehat more fuzzy but still offers the same-ish four minutes of pop-punk. And you have nine more tracks, that are pretty much indistinguishable. It's vanilla ice cream. In a white, plastic bowl. Sitting on a beige counter top. In a nondescript house. In a boring middle class suburb.
So this CD will eventually make it's way from my vehicle to my house. At some point my girlfriend will yell at me about leaving things laying around, and I'll take it upstairs to my man-cave. I'll load it on my computer and import it to Itunes, because that's what I do. Eventually I'll sync my Iphone and it will become part of the library of 1500ish songs on there. I'll hear one of the tracks at some point while listening to music at work or playing a computer game at home and as soon as it's over, I'll forget it and probably won't remember what band it was that I just listened to.
And all that kinda sucks, because Amber Pacific had a lot of potential.
