My own private Emocide

Here we have a 5-piece from Illinois with thir major label debut called “Wide Eyes”. Yet another Indie-/Emo-/…release which is good, but doesn’t blow me away. All in all, throughout the 11 songs, the feel stays within a - guesstimated - 10-20bpm midtempo range - which is great for emo-days. For my taste this simply makes a bit of a boring compilation of songs with an all too similar sentiment. Supposedly during the recording phase of the album the band was robbed a number of times; furthermore their bio talks about their bad luck with customs, sucky jobs, tours and what not. Up to 2005 I only knew these $stories referred to as “life on the road”.
Lyric-wise the band tries to keep it abstract and metaphorical. But don’t worry they don’t make it all too hard to decypher the texts and get the picture. My personal favorite on this 41-minute long player is the Jimmy Eat World-esque “What it meant to be clean”.
Victory Records doesn’t really surprise anymore by putting out artists that one would much rather expect on labels like Vagrant - and thus The Junior Varsity are another act in their wide range of opium for the EmTeeV-Emo generation (yes, they even have a Livejournal account) and will get the word out to the ones who are into what the band does. Still, I consider it unlikely for them to pull new faces into the Indie-Wave.
2.5 out of 5

The booklet-artwork is somewhat astronomy inspiread and kept very dark. I like the nebula-backgrounds. But then again - I am a sucker for any Hubble-shot as it is. The space pictures are combined with monochromatic city images and backlit persons. While this provides a “being alone”-notion I don’t get the nebula connection. Nevertheless the album is visually felicitous.
4 out of 5

total 3 out of 5