plorentz's Full Review: Walk This Way by The White Tie Affair
Chicago's The White Tie Affair is one of a few zillion new bands that have cropped up in the wake of the success of groups like Panic At The Disco, The All-American Rejects and (geographic neighbors) Fall Out Boy, producing crisp, emotionally heightened power pop that you can dance to. Since all of these bands jump off roughly the same musical cliff, it's often hard to judge the comparative merits of one lemming to another. Panic has the best make-up and the most colorful videos. The All-American Rejects have a knack for effective mob choruses and the kind of slovenly stoner-centric humor you might find in a Judd Apatow flick. Fall Out Boy are simply a musical force of nature channeling post-adolescent rage into raise-your-fist, chant-along songs which, in the most benign contexts are merely super-catchy, but in certain situations, can be scary powerful. (You haven't known fear until you've witnessed a mob of over-caffeinated, suburban teenagers shouting "This ain't a scene, it's a god! damn! arms! race!" in a darkened gymnasium.)
This is what boy bands look and sound like in 2009, and on their debut album Walk This Way, TheWhite Tie Affair take lessons from all of the above, delivering a promisingly competent, compact and contagiously energetic set of uniformly catchy songs without doing too much to distinguish themselves otherwise. If anything, their primary innovation is that they seem to embrace their Boy Band Essence less ironically than any of their fellow scenesters (err- arms racers?): Fall Out Boy might land a hit on the dance charts, but you get the feeling that happens almost as a cross-over novelty, a happy byproduct of their more respectable rock intent. But TheWhite Tie Affair seems to court the dance clubs, Top 40 radio, and the emo kids equally, by design. That their music might find an audience with the emo kids' parents - me, for instance - would seem to be a happy accident; although the fact that they cite both Stevie Wonder and Loverboy as influences certainly earns them brownie points with the grown-ups.
Lead singer Chris Wallace may bear an alarming vocal resemblance to Panic's Brendon Urie, but his phrasing on the verses of "The Letdown" suggests a master class thesis in the school of Beyonce, and the opening "Allow Me To Introduce Myself... Mr. Right" precisely replicates the sleazy white-boy retro-funk of Maroon 5. Meanwhile "The Enemy" is pure Ultimate Dance Party 1997 - it's awash in hot pink eurosynths, and its rhythmic hook immediately recalls Daniel Bedingfield's superfabulous millennial club smash "Gotta Get Through This".
This omni-pop meets emo-teen approach may place them squarely in guilty pleasure territory - roughly the third or fourth circle of pop hell - but in the production team of Wired All Wrong (Jeff Turzo, formerly of 90s techno-rockers God Lives Underwater, and Matt Mahaffey, who recorded as Self in the 90s, and produced one of the most wonderful and underappreciated records of that decade in the form of 1995's Subliminal Plastic Motives), The White Tie Affair have found the perfect co-conspirators, two experienced studio wizards with a proven record of genre-busting awesomeness. As with their own records, Mahaffey and Turzo have booby-trapped Walk This Way's ten songs with a private militia scale arsenal of sonic landmines - unexpected time and tempo changes, strategically deployed shots of AutoTune, and other splashes of colorful digital glitchery - but their biggest accomplishment seems to be the way they play with the very predictability of The White Tie Affair's chosen genre, the way they constantly tweak our assumptions, smack us around with them a little bit, and then leave us wanting more, and feeling like fickle, sugar-addled children. For instance:
Before Wallace starts singing on the band's signature hit "Candle (Sick and Tired)", the burbling synth intro seems to be preparing us for the latest Cher comeback single. Then, after a line or two of the first verse, you start to realize that this isn't Cher at all, but the latest bubblegum hit by Jesse McCartney. (Like, duh...) Then, the beat kicks in and from there, the song blindsides us as a punchy, guitar-driven (but oh-so-emotionally vulnerable) chunk of power pop ear candy - your diet's telling you to resist, but you can't keep your hands out of the dish - a perfect vehicle for the song's story of two people who've just broken up, who both feel cruddy and defeated for having broken up, but don't know how to remedy the situation. Schmuck-hood has never sounded so damned uplifting as it does when Wallace pleads for "somebody" to "turn the lights on" and confesses that he's "burning for you, burning like a candle"; and if "Candle" ultimately turns out to be the band's first and last chance at mainstream success (not a far-fetched proposition), it will have given one-hit-wonder-dom a fabulous make-over as well.
- - - - - BECAUSE YOU NEED TO KNOW: "Walk This Way" by The White Tie Affair Slightly Dangerous / Epic Records Released 4/22/2008
Produced by Matt Mahaffey and Jeff Turzo (Wired All Wrong) 36 min.
SONGS: Allow Me To Introduce Myself... Mr. Right - The Letdown - Candle (Sick and Tired) - Scene Change - Watching You - The Enemy - Take It Home - Price of Company - If I Fall - The Way Down
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