Here’s the thing. Whether we like it or not, this whole dance/pop/screamo thing is here and while record labels look to snap up every band playing it, it’s here to stay. Brokencyde may have wound up being the ‘biggest’ of these bands, but it’s undoubtedly paved the way for the likes of Attack Attack! and Breathe Carolina to get in on the action. They’re Marmite bands – they split people down the middle, you love it or hate it and there’s no middle ground. But it does mean there’s so much written about these bands that it makes them impossible to ignore – and when the kids lap it up and buy the albums in their thousands (this record has had some serious chart action in the US) it inevitably means we’ll be hearing much more about them in the UK.
‘Hello Fascination’ is not that bad an album. At least it doesn’t resort to needing the shock factor (Brokencyde) or some silly on-stage dance moves (Attack Attack!) as a gimmick. At times it’s pretty fun – pretty disposable too mind – and there are some huge singalong moments. Yet at the same time there are some rank bad songs too. ‘Hello Inconsistency’ may well be a better name for this record as tracks like ‘Welcome To Savannah’ and ‘Velvet’ are pretty awful, yet the next song seems to be infinitely better.
When the band resort to screaming and hacking their way across a dance-fueled, synth-laden beat it pretty much sounds awful. The band are much, much, much better when they sing and ‘Can I Take You Home?’, while sounding a little boy-band like, is actually a really fun and catchy song. Ditto ‘Take Me To Infinity’. It’s just such a shame this record seems to fall into the trap of being too obvious and throwing in everything that makes some of their soundalike peers so bad.
Whether we like it or not Breathe Carolina will infest our shores sooner rather than later and have a whole bunch of kids idolising them in next to no time. They’re better than most of the bands doing the same thing, but there are way too many flaws for this album to get long-lasting mainstream appeal. Unless they manage to iron out the kinks (and the obvious nods towards fashionable trends), I think they’ll wind up being more fad than fantastic.