Santi : The Academy Is. . . : Review : Rolling Stone

The Academy Is . . . are five suburban Chicago young’uns with excellent connections (they’re on Fall Out Boy’s label) and a major-label debut that offers big, not-exactly-emo songs with high hook quotient and a well-modulated guitar attack. When Santi is good (on “We’ve Got a Big Mess on Our Hands” and “Neighbors”), they’ve got a sugar-shot late-Eighties pop-rock appeal, but most of the album is forgettable, or worse: Songs like “You Might Have Noticed” are annoyingly dark and whiny, and a couple of cuts – including the T-Rex-y “Bulls in Brooklyn” – dip into classic rock but don’t give you much else of interest. Singer William Beckett’s swoops and swoons are part of the problem – anyone who moans about laying an “existential kiss upon your neck” has some ’splaining to do.