The Working Title: “About-Face”

Filed under: Music Reviews   

(Universal Records)

Representing the sub-Radiohead school of easy listening grunge (mostly for the benefit of listeners who generally prefer your typical pasteurized bunch of emo Luddites over Radiohead in the first place) is Working Title’s full-length followup to their 2004 EP. It’s emo hooked up to a Sony-alt I.V., say Thursday being invaded by Guster, commercialist after a Maroon 5 fashion but messy enough to punk low-rung hipsters into thinking they’ve stumbled onto something enormous. While Joel Hamilton swiffs bagfuls of air Thom Yorke-like between vocal lines randomly clipped out of the undergrad-angst manual of style, his compatriots busy themselves decorating the dump with scattershot test-patterns, docile U2 jangle and rawk-god ringouts. Outro track “Turbulence,” albeit a break from Hamilton’s oafish lunging for anything vaguely resembling a hook, exhibits a latecomer’s case of Jonestown worship via a pomp-alt dirge stretched out to the federally mandated ten minutes.

Posted on April 5th, 2007.

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