What we have here is a failure to commiserate. Or, admittedly, for my part: a faulty perspective-taking mechanism. This sort of wide-eyed high school glory rock, here pressed and sold by The Red Hot Valentines, is altogether lost on me, and though I'd rather not think too intently on where it would have registered with me at fourteen (I just flat out don't trust myself, to be honest), I'm wholly out of this band's target audience nearly ten years thereafter. Not to mention, newly down on the hollow plight of today's pubescent youths-- or at least the sort of music they can get their hands on.
All ten songs from Summer Fling fall neatly within the confines of a Jimmy Eat World to Saves the Day enclave, with some synth-peppered Rentals textures looming portentously on the territorial outskirts. Crunchy three-chord pop/punk guitars ride kid-safe emotional rollercoaster dynamics through brimming-thick and baseline/vocal-thin. The formula features a sort of sing-by-committee affair that sometimes forgivingly uses three-part harmonies to drown out the nasal lead vocal mewling. "Wishful Thinking" adds a little more punch to the mix, and the requisite acoustic lamentation "I Want To" ventures into shallow Get Up Kids tide pools, but for the most part, these songs are unabashedly linear.
The packaging even features a notebook-styled lyric book, filled with playful and lovelorn margin doodling, Polaroid pics of the band making funny faces, and handwritten lyrics-- five pages of: "I've got a pocket full of secrets/ No one knows what I keep in it," "Are you that far away from me that you'd forget about the time we watched the sunrise from my car/ And you woke up in my arms?" (Curfews?! Anyone?), "Tell everyone I'm chasing the sun/ 'Cause I can't wait for summer." Everything above serves to remind me: There's a damn good reason I've conveniently/permanently misplaced my own high school poetry.
These fine young men may well be the sort guys you'd one day want your daughter to bring home from college; innocent, well-intentioned, and musically inclined-- but when I have kids I don't want to find this sort of album lying around the house, or, God forbid, hear it blaring from upstairs while I'm trying to organize my compact disc collection.
