Hawthorne Heights - IfOnly You Were Lonely

Mon 13th Feb, 2006 in Music Reviews

It has been a big couple of years for the Dayton, Ohio natives, in 2004 signing up to highly influential American emo and punk label Victory Records and releasing one hell of a solid record. That album, The Silence in Black and White, went on to spend every single week of 2005 in the US top 200.

So the time is now 2006 and they’re back at it again with tales of love and hate, or at least that’s what one would reasonably assume with a title so cliché as If Only You Were Lonely. After their impressive debut on Victory a couple years back, there are enormous expectations on this album, with the label projecting to not only debut at number one on the charts, but to sell over 200 000 copies in its first week alone.

There are some pretty big calls being made about this album, such as “a painfully beautiful album that is nothing short of the biggest rock record of 2006.” That’s a lot of expectation to live up to, and it couldn’t possibly live up to such a statement. Or could it?

Hawthorne Heights will divide the music community. They’re not groundbreaking and they’re certainly not straying from the tried and true formula of many of their label mates, so if you’re not all that impressed with their predecessors you can stop reading here. For those who dig this kind of thing, Hawthorne Heights are masters of the craft and to give the record a spin would be highly recommended.

In early January Saying Sorry surfaced as the first single off the new release, a strange choice considering its lack of hooks as compared with more upbeat tracks This Is Who We Are, Pens and Needles and Dead In The Water.

Thankfully Hawthorne Heights have varied it up just enough across the album to make it possible to listen the whole way through, though listening is still tedious at times. A few times through the album, parts of the latter songs sound as if they were just ripped up off earlier tracks, but it’s probably just a lack of imagination on the band’s behalf in trying to push on with something new.

What it probably all comes down to, though, is the old saying that if it ain’t broke then don’t fix it. It’s worked for them in the past, and they have a label that sure knows shit from clay when it comes to their genre. To do so well with their last album, they obviously have the winning formula and can only go from strength to strength.

A lot of the lyrics are softly spoken or barely sung with any melody, and to their huge credit it is a nice change of scenery from the usual sing/scream/sing/scream formula that just about every band within the genre feels they need to utilise to have any worth.

So you’re either a fan who will be through the doors of your local record store already, or you will be left wondering whether it’s really worth forking out the twenty-odd dollars for. Maybe stick to MySpace and Pure Volume for the moment. Most of the songs aren’t too different from each other (with the exception of Decembers, with its almost bluesy or country-ish slide guitar and slow beat), so to even listen to two or three songs would give an indication of whether it’s for you or not.