Wakefield - American Made

Alright, no playing around and talking about the band’s history or anything for this review, let’s get to it. Wakefiled is generic pop punk that fails to impress or really stir any emotion at all except boredom. Unlike the recently reviewed new Relient K disc, Wakefield seem to offer nothing new to the pop punk format and sound like every other band that the major labels scooped up when Blink 182 exploded. The vocals are often whiney, the guys look like a bunch of dorks, and the whole package just stinks. Plain and simple, it’s major label fodder. I did give it a chance, and at times I almost began to root for the band. Songs like “Girls Rock Boys”, which have a little pop punk promise, push you to the next track with the hope that maybe the rest will be good, but these moments are few and far between and never really lead anywhere. I guess the root of the problem is that it just seems manufactured to me . From the look, to the sound, to the fact that songs were written by the band and “EMM”, who could be Arista’s team of song writers for all I know. It’s funny, as unoriginal and uninspiring as this album is, there are quite a few songs I could hear kiddies screaming about as it plays on TRL. In that sense it is exactly what a lot of people are looking for, disposable, semi-energetic, ‘young’ music. However, here at Silent Uproar we look for a little more than that in an album, and therefore think American Made sucks. [www.wakefieldrocks.com]