Heartbreak Club – Lamecore

For some reason, I think this band secretly wants to fail. The cover just screams at you to just stay away. Not only is it bright pink with a decaying roller coaster with a generic name like Heartbreak Club but the album itself is called Lamecore. I don’t know about you, but when someone goes out of their way to call themselves lame before you’ve even met them, you tend to believe them. There’s nothing on the record that looks remotely interesting and song titles like The Girl @ TGUK and She Talked To Me! do little to improve that impression. So right away there’s a black mark going into the album as you expect it to be just boring, typical, emo/pop-punk dribble. Luckily though, the album wasn’t nearly as bad as they make it out to be; however, it’s not that much better.

Once you get past the annoying faux-answering machine introduction with a high pitch teenage girl giggling about her cat, you’re introduced to the heart and soul that is The Heartbreak Club – and just like I first predicted, it’s your generic pop-punk fair. With nasally, out of tone vocals from front man Teddy Hernandez and three chord pop-punk power chords and distinct drumming patterns, the band tries to recapture some of the later seventies pop-punk glory days. Sadly though, they can’t quite reach it, mainly due to the out of tone vocals which are unable to truly support the sound the band is aiming for. The mellower, high-hat heavy Boy Said / Girl Said see them taking a new turn – aiming for a Weezer-esque nerd rock vibe but that seems forced compared to the earlier tracks which, while nothing spectacular, were easy little ditties to devour.

But even though the pop-punk sound isn’t quite as lame as they make it out to be, it does fall victim to so many God-awful cliches and painfully horrible lyrics that you can’t help but cringe at times. The spoken word breakdown in She Talked To Me! that ends with the oh-so-clever pick-up line “So, do you like, uh, stuff?” only makes me smile because I think of a pathetic Ralph Wiggum uttering the same words to Lisa on that fateful Valentine’s Day episode. The screams peppered softly in the background of Bethanie seemed forced and pointless – as if they’re just trying to grab some “scene” points. And don’t get me started on Like The Weather which opens with “Love is a thing / an invisible thing / that is real in the arms of a lover / and in the next verse I’ll elaborate more“. It is in those weak moments, that seem to happen all to often on the EP, that the album does seem incredibly lame.