Story of the Year - Wake Up

  by Russell Ferguson

published: 1 / 6 / 2008

Label: Epitaph Records
Format: CDS

intro

Enjoyable, but insubstantial and formulaic first single from hardcore rockers Story of the Year's much hyped third album, 'The Black Swan'

Once in a while you will ‘discover’ a band and think that they are new to the scene, but then the more you look and you realise that this is actually a band that has been around for a while. 'The Black Swan' is the third album by Story Of The Year.So why the sudden burst of fame ? Why has Story Of The Year suddenly been picked up by the music press and there are adverts over all it for‘The Black Swan’? When the PR machine decides to move it does so with the skill and precision of a sniper in cornfield. It is hard to see and you didn’t really see it coming until its hit you between the eyes. The fact is that a record label, Epitaph in this case, thinks it has something to market; it has a product that it perceives to be better than anything out there at the moment, something to push into the faces of the buying public and claim that it is different. ‘Wake Up’, the first single from 'The Black Swan', isn’t a bad record. It’s produced very well and is crystal clear in its sound. You can’t fault it on a technical level. After all it has all the best things a rock song should have, a bit of anger, clever but clichéd lyrics, a fiddly bit on the guitar as the intro, and a variety of tempos from verse to chorus. It, however, falls down simply because it has stuck to the formula a little too well. If you did not tell the rock kids who this was they would get confused between 30 Seconds To Mars, Fightstar, Taking Back Sunday, Rise Against and anyone of the hundred bands who are touting this particular brand of rock music. I actually quite like this record, but it’s like looking at a thousand black shirts. They all look much the same yet you can tell them apart. This record gets lost in the amount of similar songs out there at the moment, which is something of a shame really.

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