(U-WIRE) SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Doctors take the Hippocratic Oath, which binds them to clearly delineated ethical standards. But for music critics, there is no such oath. Critics can basically write whatever they want without consequence, but most of us typically come up with our own set of ethical and creative guidelines that we allow to inform our work.
One of my personal ethical rules is I try at all costs to avoid snarkiness in my use of titles of songs, albums or band names, because I think it’s unfair, uncreative and simply beneath me. For example, if the band Garbage released a bad record, as it seems so fond of doing, I wouldn’t say something like “the new album from Garbage lives up to the band’s title,” because it’s corny and cheap.
That’s why it causes me such discomfort to write a review of “If Only You Were Lonely,” the sophomore release from Ohio’s favorite emo bleeding hearts, Hawthorne Heights. I’d love to stick to my guns at all costs, refusing to abandon my principles no matter what. But when a band as expertly awful as Hawthorne Heights gives its songs titles like “We Are So Last Year,” “Cross Me Off Your List” and best of all, “Where Can I Stab Myself in the Ears,” I mean … come on, I am but human. I must give in.
I’ll get it out of the way. With songs like “Where Can I Stab Myself in the Ears,” the album makes the listener pray for an answer to that question. “Lonely” is a putrid goulash of contrived ideas executed with hilarious earnestness. It’s enough to garner pity for the quintet, which seems so eager to separate itself from the rest of the mainstreamo pack, yet ends up with a result that is derivative at its best and embarrassing at its worst.
“We Are So Last Year” falls into the former category, with its tension-and-release riffing and layered whines and screams. It’s tolerable musically, but then come the lyrics, which would only win honorable mention in an eighth-grade poetry contest: “I just wanted you to know, that I think about you every night / When I fall asleep, you are in my dreams.” Is Diane Warren ghostwriting rock records now?
At least “Last Year” finds Hawthorne Heights on their own territory. On the ballad “Decembers” (which closes the album in cliché fashion), the band foregoes the guitars for a piano and limp drum programming and winds up with a Savage Garden B-side. Again, the cloying, Lisa Frank-diary lyrics grate: “You don’t have to speak because I can hear your heartbeat / Fluttering like butterflies searching for a drink.”
“Lonely” is almost unlistenable from beginning to end (except maybe for “Breathing in Sequence,” which at least starts compelling), and despite my desire to avoid reading into the song titles, I’d like to think the band knows it. What it lacks in musicianship it makes up for in manners, as evidenced by track five, “Saying Sorry.” I forgive you, Hawthorne Heights.
