Review Summary: A ghastly aftermath of what must’ve been a Special-Ed class’ reunion, that might add water to the mill in the argument that the Flynn Effect is a fallacy.
People are quick to cast substandard music into oblivion. Stunningly, this might be a mistake. It seems that bad art always lurks somewhere to prey on the unsuspecting audience. Be it teens, or people on the onset of their foray into its realms. I can’t help, but think that, however bankrupt, bad music should be a case study – a precedent, so that we cease repeating the same mistakes, and move on culturally. Otherwise, we keep re-learning Newtonian mechanics, Calculus, cataloguing human thought, recording some "Dj Fresh Beatz” tracks, and what have you over-and-over, going in circles. The very reason school kids would visit a penitentiary is (sans acquiring new pen-pals) so that they might learn, from a third party, the mistakes that may de-rail all their endeavors in life.
Enter Teen Hearts – a self-described pop-rock/power pop band that had spurred the aforementioned thought. Exploring today’s culture is, indeed, a dance in a minefield – and I just got unlucky. This is, bar some of the Deathcore and 80’s rock, the most text-book, generic, safe, and artistically insipid approaches to music I’d come across in a long, long time.
The album’s sound is as sterile as it is flat (as anyone's cerebrum would be after a few listens). The beats and songs they support are generic, by the numbers – melodically, rhythmically and length-wise; electronica, with some discount Casio keyboard-style effects to “round out the soundscape” (…); generic guitars are slapped atop to, I presume, give the music some edgy flair. The jolly, gay (equivocation intentional), simplistic, semi rock-ish, yet persistently sugary music serves as a backdrop to a boy-band reject, irritatingly auto-tuned (could it be any different?) vocals, which serve to deliver seemingly corporate-brainstormed, stereotypical teenage girl-oriented lyrics. The only break from the torturous “innocence” (again – equivocation very much intended) comes in the form of the uncredited cover of Ace of Base’s “The Sign”(what a choice), and amusingly ironic segments of "All For Nothing (I'm Glad You're G G G Gone)" [“You’ve got a lot to learn/You can’t treat people this way”]in hindsight of the band member’s response to one bloggers criticisms (calling him n*&&%r c#$t among other things), and outward overall cognitive power standing behind this outing.
Though short, the album feels like a long, painful ordeal. Yet, this time-dilating experience gave me an occasion to ponder – about the pedophiliac undertone of such music (all the band members being in their mid-to-late 20’s); inflation - this probably costs a half-moths Prohibition-era rent; cyclic, rather than semi-linear, fluctuating-trend nature of cultural development. In summation, the album was a highly educational experience for all the wrong reasons. Generic, unknowingly cynical, uninspired, and offensive to possibly all fans of the styles it incorporates; pop-rock, electronica, powerpop, this album is a lesson to be learned, that the Internet, no matter how much a civilization’s leap it is, can do much harm giving a band like this the opportunity to garner a fanbase, who might, for years to come, be deprived of truly artful music, having their taste skewed by such cheeseburger of an album.
