On earlier albums from this Utah quartet, singer Bert McCracken mixed up seductive mall-emo crooning with a kind of can't-look-away appeal, yowling about suicide and his old drug addiction. McCracken hasn't lightened up on album number four, which he says is "about coming to grips with how much you really hate yourself." He delivers overheated poetry like "As history gets lost and as I took that final breath, I felt alive," and his bandmates rock like shiny Satans. But when "Empty With You" starts with a slick, shimmery verse, then explodes into a big-ass chorus about the union of two empty, haunted souls, it just sounds annoying — or, worse, conventional.

Share

• Email
• Stumble
• AIM
• Del.icio.us
• DiggThis
• Fark It!

CHRISTIAN HOARD

(Posted: Aug 31, 2009)