The Scenic
A few months back, SPIN ran an article on what they dubbed “emo voice” – the nasal, artless vocal style of approximately 56,000 soundalike mallpunk bands whose sense of musical history goes no further back than Saves the Day and the Promise Ring. While Victory Records has been responsible for inflicting many a tuneless warble about a relationship gone bad on the music-buying populace, they’ve baked the whitest white bread to date with The Scenic, who have to be the blandest of the bunch by far.
Find Yourself Here brings all the standard junior-high target-market tropes to the table: slightly Weezerfied sensitive-boy harmonies (the opening “Lights Out” actually calls to mind Weezer’s far superior songs); that one “the guitarist is playing through a telephone” effect in the breakdowns; lyrical references to adolescent takes on love and obsession that would get normal people arrested — “I watch you from your bedroom/I’m liking what I see” (“Notice Me” — does that sound like a stalking reference to you too? Don’t people realize that MySpace stalking is safer, less obviously creepy – and legal?). Like most of these Warped Tour bands, their greatest crime isn’t that they’re untalented — it’s that they’re not particularly memorable. The Scenic could be swapped out onstage with any number of polite lip-pierced boys prepackaged for meeting Mom, and the teenage girls they’re singing to wouldn’t know the difference.
Find Yourself Here advertises itself as pop-rock, but this is a boy band with guitars, O-Town learning to play instruments. The Scenic are that first group your 30-year-old friend in the good local band was in right after high school. His old band gets nostalgic wisecracks; Victory hands today’s version record deals. Dare I say it? Kids these days.
