The Academy Is...; let's go ahead and get the fact out that they have a horrible name. With horrible names running throughout America nowadays, we can't judge a band simply by a name.
The Academy Is... hail from Chicago, which is famous for Mike Ditka and The Super Bowl Shuffle. This is their first full-length album and their first release on their new label, Fueled By Ramen. Also, it is rumored that they signed with Atlantic last year.
The opening song, "Attention," starts simply by the line, "Attention attention! / May I have all your eyes and ears to the front of the room / if only, if only for one second"or this one from "Classifieds:" "My life reads like the classifieds / Pages of what's for sale / what's on the auction block." This basically follows the lyrical path that this CD takes. They really are lyrics that could be written by a teenager who has some kind of angst towards a girl, a parent, something like that.
The singer's voice is tolerable at times, like in "Black Mamba," where the music and his voice during the chorus flow together quite well. His crooning can at times be very catchy, and at other points, like in "The Phrase That Pays," his voice makes me want to yank the music out of the CD player and smash it into a thousand pieces. It's like his vocal range is a lot lower than what he is achieving. Also, there are hardly any backup vocals, which could have made it a little more bearable.
Musically, it is way too clean, but a few times, it's catchy. It's the standard pop-punk that is calling itself pop-punk nowadays, and at times can help drown out the vocals. But it seems like it is missing something that could make it 10 times better. The hooks at times can be infectious, but at other times get very redundant.
This CD is only for those people that enjoy that the ooeist of the gooiest of pop-punk like Fall Out Boy. That band was the one thing that popped into my head as soon as the first song started. For everyone else, steer clear. This is the kind of stuff that will find its way across MTV and soon be forgotten.