Aug 19 2008
Makeout Party - Lengths And Limits
Makeout Party
Lengths And Limits
Make Music Collective; 2008
As any fan of quality pop music knows, songs about love – whether real, imagined, unrequited, or fulfilled – have dominated the charts for decades. So, while the source material certainly isn’t new (there’s that whole matter of millennia of love themes in classic literature), the approach to crafting a love song (or an album full of them) must strike a balance between sounding both fresh and timeless. The lyrics must be genuine, the singer sincere, and the melodies creative; if any one of those three components is lacking, regardless of how substantive and worthwhile the other two are, the entire effort suffers.
Suffice to say that it’s the lack of imaginative music that plagues Lengths And Limits, the debut LP from Makeout Party. Even though Carmen Cirignano employs a wistfully believable voice to intone each track’s above-average love poetry, the clichéd emo-flavored musical ingredients utilized by this New Jersey group that make the album less than stellar. There’s simply a distinct lack of punch throughout the record, whether it’s the all-too-familiar guitar riffs and harmonizing vocals or the fact that the tempo varies very little from song to song. It’s very easy to relate to the emotional substance of the lyrics, but when the entire project seems to copy directly from early Dashboard Confessional, it’s hard to take the group or its music very seriously.
