'Caution:' This album is just plain mediocre

Hot Water Music is one of those bands that I always resolve to see when it plays the Warped Tour. Then I get my program for the multiple-stage punk festival and realize there is always someone better playing on another stage at the same time. So I decide to miss the band and wait until next year, when someone else invariably comes around and forces me to miss Hot Water Music again.\nListening to Caution, the band's fifth full-length studio album, reminded me that while this band remains competent and professional, there will always be somebody better.\nHot Water Music plays a brand of emo called post-hardcore that's supposed to appeal to people who find bands like the Get Up Kids and Jimmy Eat World too immature. In case the listener doesn't get where the musicians are coming from, they list their influences/similarities on the acknowledgments page of the CD booklet: Rival Schools, its antecedent band Quicksand and Leatherface.\nSong lengths are closer to three minutes instead of two but still full of pep. Tracks like "Remedy" and "The Sense" have angular guitar hooks. Co-frontmen Chris Wollard and Chuck Ragan both sing passionately, even if they try to imitate Leatherface singer Frankie Stubbs a little too much.\nThe lyrics, though, are hard to take. Many of them deal with the fear of losing everything, as if being happy will lead to an eventual downfall. In "I Was on a Mountain," Wollard sings, "Caution: the solid ground that you / Are on will slide from under you." In "One Step to Slip," the first line is, "It's one step to slip off the edge to trip." "Sweet Disasters" has an oxymoronic title but just comes off as moronic, as the band concludes that it is better to have loved and lost. Didn't we all learn this when we were 15?\nIf you like your punk/emo intelligent rather than funny, perhaps you will like this more than I did. To me, though, it just fell into the same pseudointellectual trap that some people mistake for credibility.