Tuesday 31 March 2009

A Day To Remember "Homesick"


Homesick is the most recent effort from A Day To Remember, Floridian purveyors of mosh heavy pop-punk and the 'scene band of the moment'.

ADTR (the acronym they shall be referred to from here on in) made their name with their 2007 record For Those Who Have Heart (FTWHH) which combined, in a fairly novel and enjoyable fashion, equal parts of New Found Glory-esque pop-punk and thundering breakdowns reminescent of bands like Bury Your Dead and Stick To Your Guns. Sadly Homesick presents a lazy and quite tedious successor to FTWHH and makes me wonder exactly why I liked ADTR in the first place.

My main problem with this album is its' sheer lack of originality. Homesick seems to be the elephant burial ground where all the discarded and lonely tracks from the FTWHH sessions have come to die a slow and painful death courtesy of rampant overproduction and excessive beatdowns. All the elements which made FTWHH so much fun in the first place (eg. catchy choruses, clever breakdowns) seem to have been purposefully eliminated in favour of extremely stock pop-punk melodies sandwiched between thick and very frequent slabs of open chord breakdowns. I haven't actually heard a record with this many almost identical breakdowns since the last August Burns Red album, and haven't had the same sense of hearing exactly the same song over and over since, well, the last August Burns Red album.

To top it off Homesick also proudly sports guest vocal appearances from the voices behind fellow vendors of sub-par, dumbed-down mosh music The Acacia Strain, Devil Wears Prada and VersaEmerge. Now whilst the acquisition of scene points is essential for a band like ADTR it seems a little pointless to feature vocal contributions from 3 vocalists who all sound exactly the same as Jeremy McKinnon (ADTRs frontman) anyways. As with every other element of Homesick this seems to be a fairly cheap cash-in by ADTR to appeal solely to breakdown-worshipping, Macbeth-wearing and Oli Sykes-fellating scene kids everywhere.

This cheap cash-in (aka Homesick) will inevitably be a huge hit with kids who spell brutal with two O's and own at least 2 Parkway Drive shirts so I have to commend ADTR for making a record that will make them some serious scene cash, it'd just be nice if they could make some decent tunes for the rest of us over 15s to listen to.

You like, you'll like:
A Day To Remember - For Those Who Have Heart
The Devil Wears Prada - Plagues
New Found Glory - Sticks and Stones
Bury Your Dead - Beauty and The Breakdown
August Burns Red - Messengers

No comments:

Post a Comment