Hit The Lights – Summer Bones

Hit The Lights is one of those bands that make you seriously question the state and preference of pop-punk fans.  The Lima, Ohio band has absolutely no defining features, and could be name dropped as a weak RIYL by a lazy journalist for anything from All Time Low to Four Year Strong.  Honestly, generic is too generous of a word, and mediocrity doesn’t begin to describe the blandness that makes Hit The Lights out as a band trapped in a time warp on the Ernie Ball stage in Warped Tour 2003.  As could be entirely predicted, Hit The Lights’ latest full length, Summer Bones, falls into that exact same trap.

Everything in Summer Bones just sort of blurs facelessly together into a single, indistinguishable sonic mass.  Even having listened to the album from front to back countless times over numerous weeks, I would be hard pressed to extract or reference any single defining moment or song.  Sure the tempo shifts from mid-tempo to slightly above mid-tempo when moving from “The Real” to “Life On The Bottom,” but the cheap trick has zero impact on personality.  Likewise, the deliberate and artificial crunch of “hard” landing riffs bestow the illusion of “attitude” paired with paint-by-numbers choruses of gang vocals claiming that “I’ll drop you like a ton of bricks.”  Hit The Lights is like what Simple Plan was to pop-punk in the early 00’s – they’re a safe listen for those preliminarily dipping their toe into the pop-punk gene pool, but snooze inducing for those already submerged.  Simply put, it’s all smoke and mirrors from the producer’s booth.  

Considering the top quality of bands on the Pure Noise Records roster as of late, Hit The Lights is an excusable (but marketable) blemish.  When stacked up against the likes the of labelmates like Forever Came Calling’s emotional dynamism and Elder Brother’s mature hooks, Hit The Lights just falls by the wayside.  Summer Bones isn’t terrible, it’s just terribly generic and lifeless.