Something I've always had trouble imagining is five grown men sitting in a room, writing music that directly appeals to fourteen-year-old girls, and being totally happy with themselves. Maybe it's my own musical snobbery, but I can't believe that these bands go to sleep at night, creatively satisfied, and legitimately thinking that the music they write is worth anything. They must have bigger dreams, like that elusive rock opera about the life of Jack Skellington, or making an album like Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, because The Beatles were like, so experimental and trippy, man.
With Santi, The Academy Isââ¬Â¦ have taken that step of maturing their previously lightweight sound without completely losing their minds and going all prog on their fans. I think this shows the mark of a band who are willing to expand, but are also smart enough to hold themselves back from alienating people. If you're going to make a career in this music business that will last, you have to walk that line, and that's not an easy thing to do.
The Academy Isââ¬Â¦ plays a rather straightforward take on the current emo-pop of the day. Luckily, they don't ruin their songs with out-of-place screaming, and their lyrics aren't about cutting their wrists or blacking their eyes so they can fall asleep tonight. But I still would expect a lot of people to be turned off by William Beckett's vocal style, which finds him constantly affected and precious. In his better moments, he sounds like Cedric Bixler-Zavala fronting a pop band. In his lesser moments, he just sounds like a woman. But his lyrics, in general, avoid too much cliché and sometimes challenge the listener to think about them. The last song on the album, "Unexpected Places," has the repeated plea of "Is this the way to carry on?" Though it's not totally clear what Beckett is asking, we can all hear a line like that and apply it to ourselves in whatever way we want.
The band mostly did their job on Santi by writing the pop hooks that got them signed to a major label in the first place. "Same Blood" is ruthlessly catchy, and the album's first single, "We've Got a Big Mess On Our Hands," has a vocal line that is both annoying and infectious at the same time. The standout track would have to be "Bulls In Brooklyn," which could be mistaken for Queens of the Stone Age if it didn't have Beckett singing over it.
But after a while, some of the hooks don't hold up as well as others, and the album gets a little dry. "Unexpected Places" closes the album out strongly, but towards the end it gets tough to pay attention. I'm not surprised to hear that initial sales of this album haven't been as strong as expected. Young kids can be fickle with the bands they like, and apparently Santi wasn't quite what the kids wanted. But The Academy Isââ¬Â¦ shouldn't get too discouraged, because they made an album that can stand on its own as being legitimate and good, even if it doesn't make them the superstars they probably hope to be.
