This is the third album from Oklahoman “pop-punks” All American Rejects.
Admittedly, I hate using the term “Pop-Punk” to describe any band but it seems to fit AAR, or certainly fits their new single ‘Gives You Hell’ taken from this album.
First off, I’ve never really been “in to” this band but the catchiness of ‘Gives You Hell’ was what attracted to me this album. And so I downloaded it. Read more for my verdict.
Usually in these album reviews I’d head over to the money-grabbers at Wikipedia and do some “research”, but the AAR Wikipedia page is useless. The band’s label was pretty useless too as I found out in my attempt to put their video for ‘Gives You Hell’ on our monthly video-wall.
So yeah, no background on these guys. But chances are you’ve heard at least one of their older songs or know of their existence.
I should point out that I don’t use Wikipedia for background on every band I review.
But is the album any good? Well like I said, this is the first album by these guys to grace my iTunes Library and I’m not ashamed to say so. So that’s a good thing.
I mean this album is by no means a modern-classic, but it’s easy to listen to, it’s fun and it has a sort of… different poppy sound to it too.
“I Wanna” is catchy and will please the teenage girl fans the band has, with the line “I wanna I wanna touch you”. That’s not to say I’m implying they touch their young fans. But you know what I mean.
“Gives You Hell” is the stand-out track, and that’s why it’s the lead single from the album. “Mona Lisa” is a quality acoustic track once you give it a chance.
“Another Heart Calls” has a dark feel to it at the start, with acoustic guitars at the start, guest female vocals and drums playing. The electric guitar kicks in and the exchange of vocal duties between Tyson and female-guest-vocalist (see Wikipedia could have come in handy here). Then the song gets going. And it sounds almost ‘perfect’. Gang vocals come next right after a memorable “I never asked for anyone but you” line. Back to the male/female vocals. Sounds like there’s a violin/some strings in the background too. “Oh Oh Oh” gang vocals return and that “I never asked for anyone but you” as it fades out. Very good song, I’d expect that one to be a potential single.
“Real World” starts off weird. It sounds like something from a kids tv show about Dracula or something with the organ. Again the quiet vocals from Tyson give off a “dark” feel to the song at first. Then it goes into trademark AAR territory, but with the odd borderline-dodgy organ/keyboards at times. But the lyric “this could be the real world now” is again catchy.
“Back to Me” features an opening riff that would be right at home in a Stereophonics song.
While “The Wind Blows” features a nice drum beat, but sounds like it wishes it was the 1980s.
This album starts off well, but seems to fade away toward the end and get repetitive. Well repetititve and a bit “strange”. They’ve almost over-done the keyboards/synths as if they’re trying to ressurect 1980s pop, and we all know Ladyhawke does that best.
Overall this album is a mix of very good, bad and strange.
