When I was 16, I had a meningitis jab which I reacted badly to. For hours after the injection, my arm tingled and made me feel sick. I get the same sort of tingling in my ears whilst listening to Hawthorne Heights’ album ‘The Silence In Black and White’. This album is terrible.

Hawthorne Heights are the sort of band people think I listen to because they have a bit of screaming and heavy guitar; a fact which makes me want to cry more than the emo kid who’s just been dumped by his cheating girlfriend. Signed to Victory Records? Pretty ironic really seeing as this is the least victorious album I’ve heard in quite a while.

The Ohio band encompass everything that’s wrong with bad screamo/emo today: pointless screaming, boring guitars, copycat drumbeats and a vocalist who seems to concentrate so hard on singing through his nose that he forgets to put any emotion in his voice. The worst thing about this album though is the lyrics. The number of times I’ve read ‘so cut my wrists and black my eyes’ as a myspace name makes me want to pepper my fist and swallow it whole. As for ‘please don’t use my letters to start your fires this time’…I’ll be cutting their CD into pieces and jabbing it into my eyes every time I read a good review about this awful band.

The only good song Hawthorne Heights have done is ‘Angels with even Filthier Soul’ which isn’t even on this album. ‘Ohio Is For Lovers’ is the only song I can stand to listen to the whole way through but you can get that free with any Victory Records sampler so you don’t even need to pay money to piss yourself off. The 10 second bit of piano on ‘Blue Burns Orange’ is quite pretty if you’re desperately looking for something good to say about this album which I really am. I can’t try any harder to convince you NOT to spend money on this band, please don’t encourage these depressing little tryhard failures.

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