It's not every day that you find a record so bad it drives you into a brief period of acute, introverted sorrow. When you do, it serves not only to remind us of the many detestable qualities of pop music and the music industry, but even to further sully and mar its once good name. "If Only You Were Lonely," the second record from suburban tattoo-and-all-black-clad Ohio emo quintet Hawthorne Heights, is such a record.
But where to begin? First, Hawthorne Heights is one of emo-pop's favorite sons. Their debut on Victory Records, 2004's "The Silence in Black and White," rode the commercial strength of single "Ohio is for Lovers" to interminable MTV rotation and giant record sales. They performed to thronging crowds at prominent times on last summer's Vans Warped Tour, and are currently on a 40-date arena tour with international phenoms Fall Out Boy. Let's continue to say that as heralded purveyors of emo music, Hawthorne Heights sound exactly, identically, TO A "T" like every other band in their genre.
If you have heard one of these bands, you literally have heard them all. Some guy's girlfriend broke up with him, so he wrote a one-draft poem about it in his journal during math class, and, coincidentally, his three to four best friends bought guitars, drums and studio time on the same day. In the cafeteria, our players are sitting together and alone (no one understands them anyway), when someone puts two and two together: "Let's not rehearse, but make a song out of your poem! We got instruments, right? If we make a lot of money, you can BUY her back!"
This is the most logical way to account for music this unoriginal and vapid. Listening to the songs reveals Hawthorne Heights' laughable lack of ability and personality in several waves. The first is their instrumentation. Opener "This Is Who We Are" kicks off with their attempt at being "ferocious," AKA guitarist Micah Carli's recycled power chords and drummer Eron Bucciarelli's cut-and-pasted hardcore fill. The first eight bars could have come from any band with two-weeks training and a fat recording budget, not to mention every band now on the radio.
Then, singer/guitarist/frontman JT Woodruff opens his mouth, revealing a whole new level of derivative insipidness. You know when your friend who thinks he has a good voice tries to sing prettily? Cross that awful noise with faceless alt-rock vocals and pour sugar on it, and you have Woodruff's unconvincing and whiny voice. Carli's backing vocals come next. His metalcore retching is perhaps the only part of Hawthorne Heights that isn't standard; his throaty scream is so contrived and so ridiculous that it is actually SUB-standard.
But what they're saying is more important than how they say it, and while it would be more persuasive to simply paste the lyric sheet into the body of this article, a few choice snippets will have to suffice. Lines as trite, meaningless and juvenile as these make it embarrassing to be called a writer: "Between the sadness and the smile / Lies the flicker of the fire / You always said this never hurt you / I always said you were a liar / With all the towers and the wires / There still lies a little silence / Two hearts and one connection / One voice lets emotion out."
Even more upsetting than the fact that Hawthorne Heights are getting rich off of teenage poetry that wouldn't make the cut in most high school literary magazines is that this was actually written by someone in his mid-to-late twenties.
The song plays on to its hackneyed end, shedding no discernible light on "who we are," but at least not revealing any more (read: different) levels of blatant plagiarism or musical inability. Then the next song, "We Are So Last Year," begins with another rim shot from Bucciarelli and another stale riff from Carli. The unlistenable vocals soon start griping a one-dimensional analysis of the one that got away, littered occasionally with an amateur metaphor and a dueling vocal harmony. Then the next song. And the next. Eventually a pattern starts to arise, revealing the dominant level of unimaginative musical idiocy on "...Lonely." Not only does every song sound stolen from another band, they all sound the same.
And this is what we are rewarding nowadays: Wannabe bad-asses ripping each other off and whining about their girlfriends. "...Lonely" is a universally bad record, but there are teams of people working around the clock to sell millions of copies of it. Say what you will about Britney Spears, R. Kelly and most of the rest of today's top 20, but at least they don't have any delusions: They're not passing themselves off as being interested in anything other than selling records and making bank.
Hawthorne Heights, on the other hand, want to be tortured, tatted, moshing stereotypes and still have their pictures pinned up in every 14-year-old Hot Topic-girl's room. Neither identity is inherently better than the other, but judging by their music, you sure as hell can't be both.
