There's just nothing here.

I'm sure the guys who make up June love what they do and are genuinely into this type of music, that being power-pop-punk in the vein of Taking Back Sunday and Brand New. But the music they make as portrayed on If You Speak Any Faster is simply void of any sense of originality or character. If this album didn't come with a case or any labeling, leaving me it up to me to decide who this was, I would have put $100 on it being Taking Back Sunday post-Tell All Your Friends.

Some people say that critics have no place telling the world (or at least whoever is reading) that a piece of art is no good. Well, as a product, If You Speak Any Faster is great. Brian McTernan's production is spot-on, making these guys sound more polished than a freshly dyed head of jet-black hair. Simply put, this is a good product. The vocals are clean when needed and aggressive when it suits, and the guitars are mixed just right. Punk, and I use that term loosely, has never been so accessible.

So yeah, it's a great product. But it's a disposable one. June is nothing more than a cute band full of MTV potential. Victory Records has some serious money in their accounts right now, and in all likelihood, this will make them some more. It's also going to make 99 cent bins a lot of money pretty soon, too. I don't want to generalize, but that's because the type of people who are going to buy this album are the type of people who are going to sell it four months down the road when the next quasi boy-band comes along.

It's bands like this that make me hesitant to tell people I listen to punk music. I love punk rock, but this isn't it. It's just packaged as punk and it's an insult that Victory would try to pass it off as anything more than the musical equivalent of a disposable razor. It's sharp, but at the end of the day, it's totally useless.

[originally written for Europunk.net]