Review Summary: BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!
Once upon a time there was a band called Plain White Ts that played inoffensive but pretty infectious pop-rock. Then one day everybody on earth fell in love with a song about a girl called Delilah and decided that it should become the national anthem of the universe. The album with that song on it sold billions of copies despite only the most devout of fangirls being able to even
name another track on it. But all was not well within the band! Because when Plain White Ts released the follow-up to their breakthrough record and everybody realised that they were in fact completely shit they decided they needed to win back the love of their people. So one morning the band hatched a plan! They would sneak into the kingdom late one night and do something so epic and ambitious that everybody would at once forget how bad they were and they would be crowned kings of Radioland for another couple of years or something.
So late one stormy night when all was quiet and My Chemical Romance had only just released their second successive rock opera and it had been bloated and disappointing, the band sat around an artsy-looking table and bounced ideas
literally off the wall about how they could make everybody love them again like they used to. All of a sudden cuddly singer Tom Higgenson had a fantastic idea! They would write an album about the disillusionment of youth! And it would be full of stupid references to growing up and taking sides and handclaps and most of all
anthems. Lots and lots of anthems that kids everywhere would sing and maybe just maybe one of them would make it onto the radio and everybody would stop forgetting about Plain White Ts!
So the band listened to lots of epic records and decided the most important thing was that everything sounded like it was mixed on a shiny new surface but with bits of random crap added here and there to make it sound expansive. They also realised it would be too difficult to have more than maybe two things happening at the same time and that playing at a tempo faster than what could generously be described as 'leisurely' was overrated! So they set about their task, working about 10 minutes every day when they could be bothered to think about it, throwing the odd lazy vocal melody or generic happy-go-lucky drum beat under laid-back and still grandiose electric guitars and even making the effort to merge the tracks together to make the album undeniably
cohesive.
Then the singer read all of the books in the kingdom and chose the lines he found least objectionable and made them even more cheesy and generic until they were the lamest lyrics in the world ever! And then he realised there weren't enough xylophones and happy stuff on the album so he added some more lines about the stars and fitting in and how difficult it is to be alive and philosophical things like maps and loneliness and love.
And finally all the hard work was done! And Plain White Ts could sit back and watch the world cheer and sing along with them. But they didn't.
Props for trying, though. Have half a star.
THE END
