"Dude, You Have No Idea How Bad I Want to Work Out Right Now."

That right there will pretty much tell you how the rest of this record is going to sound. Harrison Bergeron are proponents of such things as dead horse beating, trend-riding, and style aping. These exorbitantly long song titles were funny about 8 years ago when As the Sun Sets did it, but it's not funny anymore. It's not clever, it's not cute, but at very least it told me right away what kind of music the band would be playing.

You see, Harrison Bergeron want very badly to be Thrice. The fundamental roadblock in the way of them actually being Thrice, is that Thrice is an extremely, extremely talented band. As you probably guessed I'm inferring, Harrison Bergeron are not an extremely talented band. They're simply mediocre, and for the kind of style being played, mediocre isn't going to cut it anymore; there has to be some strong redeeming value, something that makes a band stick out amongst all their contemporaries. And therein lies the problem. This is a five-piece who really lack a strong songwriting vision. Individually though, the members the band is comprised of aren't too bad.

Singer James Tanner has a nice raspy scream, and sounds eerily like Dustin Krensue while singing, and guitarists Devon Bryant and James Germain play some great stuff early on in the record; "I Don't Think I'm Going to Do Hamster Style Anymore" would actually fit perfectly onto The Illusion of Safety with its catchy chorus and driving rhythms, but more and more as the album progresses, the songwriting style wears thinner and thinner, and the songs just blend together more and more. And it's hard to say what's keeping this album from being a decent one, it's just so unmemorable that you're liable to forget what you heard only ten minutes ago. The heavy parts are pulled off well, the tunings solid and the intensity there, they just have trouble really finding that groove that they need.

The sing/scream dynamic is one that's so hard to pull off well, and these guys, despite small showings of potential, don't yet have the chops to write a cohesive and memorable full-length.