Criteria frontman Steve Pedersen has lived the typical American rock n' roll dream-- small-town Nebraska kid joins cult band, splits to form own band, goes to Duke Law School, returns to Omaha to start another band. Okay, so the lawyer part's not the most conventional detour but true to form, Pedersen's a real Atticus Finch on When We Break, the band's second full-length. Rather than blubbering, teen drama-style bellyaching, Pedersen constructs a coherent argument supported by facts and analysis when bitching about his white suburban life.
Exhibit A: On opener "Prevent the World", the defendant hates being a corporate lawyer in Omaha, and wishes to join rock band: "I'm stuck in a basement world/ Where even if I try to make rock my living, it wouldn't coincide/ So how do I reconcile the success of life/ With the rational urges?" Call it sophisticated emo brought to us by "Law and Order", but the distinctions between a petulant, disillusioned teen and an argumentative trial attorney can oftentimes merge.
At this time, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to direct you to Exhibit B, Mr. Pedersen's impeccably efficient yet busy punk-pop orchestration. Of course, in order to properly analyze this evidence, the court should be familiar with Exhibits C, D and E-- Fugazi, Sparta and Sum-41, respectively. Criteria's sound follows the devolution from Exhibit C to D, flirting with E at its fluffiest, particularly on anthems "Good Luck" and "Ride the Snake". Further investigation reveals Pedersen's biggest songwriting glitch: Take away the octave riffs and dropped-d power chords, and Criteria suddenly becomes severely handicapped, a weakness the band goes at great lengths to dissemble using jagged math-rock riffs or occasional attempts at crafting "atmosphere."
Instruments aside, Pederson's filibuster vocals ultimately hamstring When We Break. The guy tries to squeeze a court case's worth of litigiousness into one album, leaving little space to breathe musically. Melodies continuously encroach on each other, colliding before a stable hook can be realized. Thus, we get into an issue where the vocalist places his own beefs, or EMOtions, ahead of the music. Not to go into a semantics/systematics debate over Criteria's classification as "emo" versus some delicacy label like "post-hardcore," but the latter term has become the "Freedom Fries" doublespeak du jour for defenders of the sound. Saddle Creek tested the threshold for this stuff with Cursive, of which Pedersen was formerly a member, but that group threw in enough fresh ideas to quash, or at least numb, most listeners' prejudices. Sadly, Criteria, if anything, only justifies the emo stigma, and I have about 36 minutes of taped evidence to back that charge.
