Pop-punk in the last few years has become an even more dominated genre then it ever was and is mostly filled with unoriginal bands. My fellow home state chums, The-All American Rejects, are just another one of these bands. Their self-titled debut somehow ended up selling over a million copies on the strength of the single,
Swing, Swing. I bought the album mainly because they are from Oklahoma, and I liked the other single
The Last Song. What I got in return for my $10 was basically a piece of crap.
I’m not kidding when I say a piece of crap either. The production on this album is fairly weak, and causes front man, and bassist Tyson Ritter’s singing voice to sound as nasal as possible. The production also just shoves certain instruments (drums and even guitars at some points) down way too low when they would be a prominent part of a song. Even if I ignored the fact that almost all of the songs are about relationships, I would still consider the lyrics utter trash.
One More Sad Song-
“One boy, one girl. Two hearts, their world. Time goes by, secrets rise. One more sad song, tears shed she’s gone. She’d take it back if only she could”. As already said, Tyson’s singing voice is very bad. Sometimes it would seem that he hadn’t even gone through puberty. With pop-punk you would figure that the songs would be catchy and for some that is true, but most of the time you just get another nasally delivered verse on a song when obviously it is supposed to be a chorus. The best vocal performance on the album is obviously
The Last Song, which I will get to later. Tyson’s voice on that song is smooth and catchy, unlike the rest of the album.
The instrumentation doesn’t get much better either. With the use of two guitars you would think more originality would be shown, but all you get is power chords and an occasional solo, that any metal head would want to kill him self if he heard it because it is slow, rather simple, and sounds to attached to the formula of the song it belongs to therefore not sounding original (
Your Star). The bass has some lines that you can actually hear, such as on the intro of
Your Star; where it has a fun, bouncy bass line, but it is still basically playing the same thing as one of the guitars. On some songs there is the inclusion of a beat box, which I don’t really understand the point of as it is just annoying for the most part, especially on the song
Time Stands Still where the intro consists of an acoustic guitar and the beat box; only to be worsened by Tyson’s singing of “oh-ooh”. The actual drums aren’t too good anyways. They are basically mixed all the way down to where you can barely hear them.
The best song on the album is easily the single
The Last Song. I really enjoyed the use of strings on this song and the production of the song is actually good. Most of the time Tyson’s voice is actually enjoyable and catchy at the same time. The palm muted power chords from the guitars seem fitting for the song in a way. This song is actually over five-minutes long, which starts to make the song grow old quick, but nevertheless; it is still the best song on the whole album. The worst song on here is actually hard to pick because most of the songs could qualify as it, but the first one that comes to mind is
Paper Heart. Tyson’s voice is incredibly weak on the song and when the chorus comes around I’m left thinking that I could be doing better things other than listening to this such as ramming my head in a wall. The instrumentation of the song is just embarrassing. All of the instruments are mixed way too low and all I hear is a “cute” piano playing a couple notes that is annoying. The obvious inclusion of the beat box in the middle of the song doesn’t help it’s case either.
When all is said and done what you can expect of this album is utter repetitiveness. No songs are good save the two singles
The Last Song, and
Swing, Swing, when really while the first of those is good, the other is average is as average does. With bad production and nothing new to offer anyways, this earns a spot on my null and void album list.
