New album leaves listeners hoping their 'senses fail'

    Senses Fail has long been a staple of the emo-core (screamo, regular old emo, what have you) scene, and for about five years now they've been dividing listeners into camps of those who adore them and those who abhor them. With its latest album, "Life Is Not a Waiting Room," the band further entrenches itself in the mediocrity of the post-screamo rock world.
    The album kicks off with "Fireworks at Dawn," a song that, for the first time in the band's history, is increasingly upbeat and hopeful, even though singer Buddy Nielsen whines, "Fireworks at dawn as I sip for assistance/ This flask keeps me calm, it reflects back my bent image/ Of someone who's lost, growing older by the minute."
    While these lines are certainly far from upbeat, the chorus brings in the rest of the band blasting away as the lyrics take a turn for the better. "So get on your feet, wipe the dirt off and get with it/ Destiny waits at your door/ It's time to move on, because the past can't be your passion/ So what if you did something wrong?/ Find someone who hasn't."
    This first song gets the listener excited for an album about redemption, moving on and finding optimism long since forgotten. But unfortunately for everyone involved, the album immediately reverts back to the self-pitying ways that fall neatly within Senses Fail's comfort zone.
    "Lungs Like Gallows," the second cut off of "Life Is Not a Waiting Room," explodes with a barrage of massively EQ'd bass drum hits and overly simple guitar riffs. Simply put, the song sounds like something that was cut from the band's previous release, "Still Searching"(2006), because it was just too generic. When a new release sounds like rejected material from a previous project, you know you've got problems.
    The real kicker is that "Lungs Like Gallows" contains the precious line, "I've been breaking mirrors since 1984" as well as "I give blood, but not for a cause" and "I open my umbrella even when I am indoors." What makes it even sadder is that apparently this band takes itself, as well as these absurd lyrics, quite seriously.
    The generic emo nature of this music doesn't stop at lyrics either; the guitar work of Garrett Zablocki and Heath Saraceno is, if anything, a regression from "Still Searching." The simplicity of barre chords and syncopated palm-mutes is an art form best left to bands such as Underoath or Atreyu.
    It only gets worse from there. The rest of "Life Is Not a Waiting Room" plays like a therapy session gone wrong. "Garden State," a song presumably about the band's glorious home state, opens with "The Garden State has never looked so pitiful and gray/ As I awake to the garbagemen today." What's that, you say? This would be the perfect place for a wasted-life metaphor? Not to disappoint, the next line reads, "I hope they take all my old mistakes/ Because I can't seem to face them on my own."
    The first single from the record comes in the form of "Family Tradition," another snappy little jingle about depression — what else is new? Although lyrics have already made up a good percentage of this review, it's correctly so, because with lines that read like "So help me, please someone come quick, I think I am losing it/ Forgive me, I inherited this from a stranger I'll never miss/ I'm sick," it's impossible not to get a good laugh out of the stilted high-school heartbreak.
    If this were a band's debut album (and it were 2002 instead of 2008), lines such as this might be excusable, but seeing as Senses Fail is now on its fourth LP release, each of which has been progressively more self-indulgent and self-loathing, it is utterly unforgivable to release an album of this drivel with any serious intentions. Undoubtedly, it won't be long before Senses Fail "mutually" parts ways with its record label as a result of this album.