RSSSecondhand Serenade Releases Hear Me Now
Aug 03
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There’s nothing like an overproduced album of generic emo rock music to make you pine for the Swiss Army Romance days of Dashboard Confessional. The new album by Secondhand Serenade, Hear Me Now, pines for those days too. Ten years ago, emo was a new take on the acoustic, minimalist broken-hearted pining that was perfected first (and still best) by Chris Carrabba. Since then, the term emo has fallen out of favor, mainly because that same heartfelt lovelorn strumming has been replaced by overdone harmonies, added layers of electronica-cheese whiz, and guitars swallowed up in the production values.
That’s where Hear Me Now steps into the fray. The emo-lyrics of heartbreak (the track Stay Away), unrequited love (album opener Distance) and romantic (mis-)connections (You and I) are still ever-present, but there’s something lost in translation. To put it succinctly, this album is boring.
I hesitate to blame John Vesely completely for this turgid mess of an album. I think he’s put together a precisely intended collection of songs. If one wants Hoobastank cited as a musical influence and if one spent their formative years listening to Third Eye Blind, well, there’s not much you can expect than the perfectly tortured agony of Hear Me Now. “Tortured” is a good way to describe the album. The production is tortured, the vocals are tortured, and the lyrics are mindlessly unoriginal and repetitive. “Is there anybody out there? Would you hear me if I screamed or if I cried?” cries out Vesely on Is There Anybody Out There. Well, what would you expect him to sing about?
Having unsuccessfully tried to identify a memorable standout track on the album, I turned to iTunes to tell me which track best spoke to Secondhand Serenade’s intended audience (of which I am so clearly not a member). That proved fruitless, since they are all still pining for 2008′s A Twist in My Story, according to iTunes Top Secondhand Serenade songs list. That left simply looking for the first single release, the track Something More.
To be fair, I went back to hear Something More one last time. With its “Breath in, breath out” lyrics, it’s not nearly as dynamic as a rock track, nor quite as sincere as any Dashboard Confessional song of the last ten years besides Don’t Wait. In fact, there’s pretty much nothing notable about the track at all except my lack of interest in hearing it again. That goes double for the album it came from. And that makes me pine for the emo days of yore too.
