What a complete and utter disappointment. This CD has made me question the point in continuing on with my dull, repetitive, redundantly boring life if all I have to look forward to in the wonderful world of music is a backstab like this. Never before had I heard of The Format, but I felt blessed when a local station decided to place one of the band’s songs on their playlist. I was hooked from the first beat of floor/snare combination.
This is good music, plain and simple, both in the instrumental performance and the layering of the vocals (the handclaps are nifty too, but then again, I’m a huge dork). So good, in fact, that you’ll be convinced to run out and search through every record store in the surrounding metro area (nine different distributors, to be exhaustingly precise) to find this little gem. Unless you’re not a complete lunatic, in which case you would decide to play it safe and actually read a review on the album before jumping into a commitment.
Imagine the euphoria of hearing that long sought after melody that’s been on constant cranial playback since your first audio encounter. The excited anticipation of an undoubtedly incredible CD. And the crushing realization that nowhere in the rest of the album do any of the tracks possess even a modicum of the same potential, the same downright talent that’s promised by ‘The First Single’. It should be their last single if these guys insist on producing this craptacular nonsense that sounds nothing even slightly like punk, emo, punk-pop, etc. In fact, if I hadn’t been so suckered in by the first track, Best Buy would have been getting a very nasty letter from me calling them out as the brainless, lying bastards that I believed them to be for placing tripe like this in their Punk/Pop section. But if they’re fool enough to actually think they can group punk and pop together, then it’s easy to see how they would be suckered in to thinking that this was actually one of the two. Since it wouldn’t even be possible to fool a deaf person into thinking this is pop, I have to assume that the erroneous corporate impression is that this is some weird category of punk.
As previously alluded, the first song is a definite addition to the music aficionado’s list of songs to hear. Once added to the good old musical memory bank, the thought of hearing this song should make your auditory senses get all tingly. Unfortunately, as the opening notes of ‘Wait, Wait, Wait’ ooze from your player, you’re still riding high on the residual effects of ‘Single’ and it’s only after several lines into ‘Give It Up’ that you begin to suspect that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong. The sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach will suddenly give way and you’ll find yourself in some hellish free fall as you realize that, oh yes, that is most definitely a tuba you hear underscoring the second chorus of the third song in the line up.
The entire album just makes me feel dirty… and not in a good way. By the time ‘Tune Out’ rolled out of the speakers, I was praying for a swift, merciful end. That was only four songs into a twelve-track album. The entire CD is like some weird twisted country music/Billy Joel/eighties soft rock tribute. Just plain trippy. While it’s just slightly too edgy to be grouped solidly in the soft rock genre, The Format‘s “format†doesn’t fall too far from the edge. If you’ve ever heard the Old 97’s, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If you haven’t, please don’t put yourself through that torture. The rest of the CD is just a blur, even after force-feeding several more rounds of it into my ears in the vain hopes that I could identify some elusive segment of the initial inspiration. Unfortunately, that spectral talent vanishes, lost forever in a track listing of mediocrity that just won’t die, almost like listening to the soundtrack of a really, really awful B-movie. Just when you think it can’t get worse… oh yeah, it does.
www.theformat.com
Nicole