The Academy Is... - Fast Times at Barrington High
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Music CD Cover
Artist: The Academy Is...Edition: Music CD
CD Release Date: 2008-08-19
Music Label: Fueled By Ramen
Soundtracks:
- About a Girl
- Summer Hair=Forever Young
- His Girl Friday
- Test
- Rumored Nights
- Automatic Eyes
- Crowded Room
- Coppertone
- After the Last Midtown Show
- Beware! Cougar!
- Paper Chase
- One More Weekend
Free Music Notes for Fast Times at Barrington High
Free Music Review: If you're over 18, this album probably isn't for you.
Hit: 2 Stars
Of course, there are plenty of 18+ people who will like the album, but for a majority this one just isn't quite about mature enough content to hold interest for long.
First off, this is not a 'bad' album, so much as a bad album for a band like The Academy Is.... Where previous albums were about life and touched on love in a more roundabout way, Fast Times is a blatant Boy Meets Girl high school soundtrack.
The first half of the album is likable because it consists almost entirely of hooks with a few other lyrics thrown in to make an actual song, while the last few are so generic they completely fade into the background if you're doing something else and you don't even notice when one song progresses into the next.
Were this released by a new band, or even a boy band, it would be considered par for the course, and in fact it feels very much as if it were released specifically to appeal to an audience between 13 and 18 in an attempt to court a wider fan base. The lyrics, when one looks at them apart from the music, revolve around the chorus and hooks and often just seem like a mish-mash of pretty sounding words instead of an actual song. It's as if William Beckett tried to take a page out of Fall Out Boy's book by making meaning with seeming randomness, only with a bubblegum pop melody that's popular with kids pouring their money into Miley Cyrus' Hannah Montana empire.
Make no mistake, the album will be popular with some. But for many young adults either in or graduated from college, whose lives revolve around things a little more complicated than passing notes to that girl or boy in homeroom, there are other groups singing about far more resonating things than a group of twenty-somethings waxing wistful about their high school years. In fact, far from being a 'feel good album' or a 'celebration of youth', Fast Times sounds more like The Academy Is...'s members had fairly sucky high school lives, if you can even pull any message at all out of what basically amounts to a bunch of repetative phrases put to music.
About A Girl, the first released song on the album that had so much hype around it, is actually fairly unclear in its message. I can't figure out if Beckett is singing about being in love, or pulling a fifth-grade "you didn't like me back then, so now I'm going to blatantly NOT sing about you now, so there". His Girl Friday may be about a girl cheating behind a boyfriend's back or it may be about a girl who left for another guy. The Test seems to be about dating somebody emotionally distant and barely interested, in a relationship doomed from the beginning. Rumored Nights follows that theme with another "she didn't put as much effort into the relationship as me" song.
The album is more about the drama that's so very important during high school years than about any real sort of growing up done during that time. For people who have moved on from the high school drama, it just doesn't resonate or mean very much. It's something you can put on in the background and bounce around to when in a good mood, sure, if you're not looking for anything too deep.
Style-wise, something about the album seems off. I'm by no means a musical genius, but much of the album sounds to me like Beckett is almost yelling to be heard over the music. In a lot of places it seems like he's singing out of his range...either going too low, like in the opening lines of Summer Hair = Forever Young, or going to a shouted, slightly-too-high in the chorus of His Girl Friday. I personally think that the album was too rushed in recording and not polished as well as it could be. Possibly in an attempt to get it out quickly in time for TAI's post-Warped tour dates. It's very probably that all of the album's shortcomings are a result of that rush, from the seemingly half-finished lyrics to some points where the lyric melody even seems to be in discord with the song's music.
In the current market, it's not a bad album. The song's chorus lines are memorable even if nothing else about them is, but I don't think any of the songs have what it takes to stay on top of anybody's interest for too long. There are simply deeper, more polished albums that don't try so hard to straddle genres being released right now. If you're a true lover of The Academy Is... rather than a fair-weather fan, then buy the album to show your support. Chances are you'll like at least one or two songs, even if they don't stick with you for too long.
Fast Times at Barrington High Poster
The Academy Is. returns with the follow up to their critically acclaimed album Santi. After wrapping their 2007 Sleeping with Giants U.S. tour they headed into the studio with Sam Hollander & Dave Katz (Gym Class Heroes, Metro Station) to work on Fast Times at Barrington High. This new album was recently described by lead singer William Beckett to Newsday as "a celebration of youth" with songs about enjoying life. He also recently spoke to Rolling Stone about how easily the album came together, saying, "I would compare it to starting over. [It's] the way we felt on [2005's] Almost Here."Alternative Rock Music CDs
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