Armor For Sleep – Smile For Them

Armor For Sleep are one of those bands that recently blew up thanks to sites like MySpace; their first two Equal Vision Records releases were received with critical acclaim and fans ate it up. So the band jumped ship to Sire and decided to release their third album through the major which, inadvertently, cut down a lot of press in the underground. Instead of the massive CD release press that they saw with Dream To Make Believe and What To Do When You Are Dead, Smile For Them fell on deaf ears for the most part and received little critical acclaim. Personally, I went into the record with very low expectations mainly since I wasn’t a fan of either of the band’s previous efforts; and after my first listen, those ideas were cemented in my brain.

Just like before, I found Armor For Sleep to be rather generic MTV emo. Smile For Them is extremely polished, full of smoothed out guitar hooks and oddly predictable. Ben Jorgensen’s vocals are your typical radio friendly vocals and the music is far too laid out and is consistently drawn out to unneeded time frames. The band covers all the necessary corners, with heavy, emo-rock cuts like Smile For The Camera, the staple slow down acoustic ballad with Lullaby and even a few electronic beats appear on Chemicals and Stand In The Spotlight (which also features the heavier emo rock vibe). My Saving Grace and End Of The World have drawn out intros that pull up images of a watered down Angels & Airwaves and throughout the whole album there fails to be a single moment that really stuck with me or surprised me.

However, the more I listened to it, I started to pick out a few elements in the songs that weren’t quite as bad as I originally thought. Songs like Run Right Back In and Smile For The Camera suddenly became oddly catchy and I found myself singing along unintentionally – something which I almost immediately regretted. The marching band drum line on Snow Globe caught my eye the third time through and the fourth time I noticed the explicit use of “nah-nah-nah”s in the background of Stars In Your Eyes which help make the song quite catchy. So despite my initial reactions, I went in to write this with a slightly positive slant; because even though it was still predictable and somewhat bland MTV emo, there were a few elements that caught my ears the more I listened.

But then I read my review for Dream To Make Believe and I realized that I went in with the some attitude for that review. Despite a slightly negative overall spin, the review still featured a fair amount of positive sayings. After further thought, I realized that I haven’t actually listened to that CD a single time since 2003 and no matter how many little portions of Smile For Them I find mildly entertaining, it doesn’t take away from the simple fact that I doubt I’ll ever actually listen to Smile For Them again. That, in the end, should say more than any dissection could ever say.