Now, before I received this CD and had a quick gander at their website, I had absolutely no idea who State Of Freedom were. If I was to guess, ignoring all my prior knowledge, I’d say they were some late 90’s pop punk band who were born and raised in the Orange County area and decided that seen as the mainstream was suddenly becoming flooded with bands playing sugary pop rock that they’d pick up their instruments and give it a crack.
Unfortunately (or not, im not sure) I’m completely off the mark. State Of Freedom are a very new band based in the sunny climes of Peterborough. Now, I’ll tell you now, I’m really biting my lip on this one, as the band are all about 15 or 16 and seem to be taking their first foray into music, so good on them. However, ‘Welcome To The Real World’ is a really bad E.P.
When the band members list their favourite bands on their bio’s as Green Day, Sum 41, The Ataris, Blink 182, Bowling For Soup and fucking Schism (Schism! Even Schism’s favourite band weren’t Schism) you know you’re in for a rocky ride. What makes it even worse is that the CD is actually very well designed and packaged, and the members are all photographed leaning against Graffiti covered walls looking wistfully into the distance and wearing their expensively bought clothes. On top of all of this, they all appear to play bloody Les Paul’s and have such intellectual song titles as ‘My New Girlfriend’ and ‘Another Summer’. It’s all so ‘3 summers ago’, or something.
Continuing down the list of ‘Things critically wrong with this CD’, we’ve got the singers vocals. Take the snotty sound of Jordan Wossname and make a 15 year old from Peterborough try his hardest to imitate everything about him and you’ve hit the nail on the head. Oh god, hang on …. The first line of ‘It Just Seems Right’ has just completely thrown me off course. “Since the fourth grade, we were meant to beâ€. No, no you weren’t! You were never in the fourth grade! Maybe you mean Year 4 or something (but then that would make you about 9 years old, and that raises many more questions, most of which imunwilling to delve into right now), but I can safely assure you that you’re not American and you never have been. You might try and sing like one, you might worship any American band with four chords and a tentative grasp on the English language, you might call yourselves AJ, AC and Woodsy, hell, you can even think of a typically clichéd American band name, but you’re from bloody Peterborough! Sorry, I said I’d bite my lip on this one.
Anyway, yes, State Of Freedom play ninth rate pop punk as is being flogged by the likes of Allister, Simple Plan and Homegrown and they all play it with a lot of help from mummy and daddy I imagine (I’m assuming at 15 or 16 they’re not working for a living, and one of the band members does thank the singers dad for ‘spending all of his hard earned cash on them). Oh, and they really want to be American. I’m also willing to bet my life on them being able to drag in a lot of people in their hometown, what with the whole Local Band Phenomena. Ultimately, they’re young and hopefully they will learn from experience, but right now, they’re really not very good at all.
Ross