Have you ever bitten into a piece of delicious looking pizza, and thought it tasted pretty good, then you take a few more bites, and it's only decent, then by the time you finish the slice you realize there's no way in hell you want to eat 7 more slices of that crap? What started out as a damn good-looking food has subsided into something that you don't even want to eat, and you're out of 12 bucks. Living Your Life On Hold by the Audible Campaign puts me in a very similar situation. At first listen, things sounded solid: good melodies, clever little guitar lines, but further inspection exposes this record for the fraud that it really is.

"Gratitude" is a good choice for an opener, with its driving guitar lines and creative start-and-stop chord progressions. Guitar aside, the song shows immediately the problem that keeps this record from being genuinely enjoyable, where it otherwise could be. Vocals. Lyrics are one element of music that can quickly make a band sound juvenile, but if the singer sounds like he's auditioning for glee club, that's when a band can quickly run into a wall. The rhythms are there, but the melodies are off kilter because the vocalist can't handle the sound or the range that another singer might be able to. It's a limiting factor that the album can never truly recover from, because it's never given ample opportunity to leave the ground. A shame, for what otherwise could have been at least a semi interesting set of songs.

Listening to "A Sudden Cause" will make light of the problems that this album possesses, as the guitar work is undeniably infectious and rhythmic throughout the course of the song, but the vocals kill any sort of momentum that may have been brewing. It's not that the vocals are completely awful, but they don't fit the fun mood of these songs, instead sounding more somber and down than the music behind it. Not just the vocals, but the lyrics feel rushed and out of place;

Our hearts are here, but I am gone / When I hear of all the things you've done / It makes me feel so empty, makes me feel like moving on / It's each second in the making we'll move further from the heart / When we leave this place we've given it all we had.

Lyrics like that only help to further bog down what could have been somewhat of an interesting album. There's pieces here that hint of something better in store, but when your weakest aspect are vocals, there's only so many things you can do to divert attention from that, and none of those things were attempted on this record. There's a good mixture of tempos and rhythms, but a good vocalist would really have solidified this lineup and made this album something enjoyable; they just don't have that right now. A shame, seeing how promising all the other elements of this band are.