As bad as the real thing

Over the past decade or so, pop-punk and emo have been two of the most popular – and polarizing – genres in music. It’s seemed like emo bands are like zombies in a bad horror movie; whenever one falls, ten more rise to take its place.

Crash Romeo would appear to be one of those bands. Their second album Gave Me the Clap is essentially just another faceless soldier in the endless assault on unique music. The album has a lot of parts taken from other musicians, and few contributions of its own.

The album starts out on a reasonably high note with “About to Break,” which is – like much of the album – a fairly catchy song. The song has touches of quality, especially in the guitar and drum technique. However, the lyrics are typical and unoriginal: “Well I’m down / But I’m not out / I’m needing you again / I’m needing you, my friend.” In general, the song sounds a lot like early Brand New.

“Victim Liar” is another fairly typical, formulaic pop-punk song, with repetitive lyrics and music – it seems like the same three guitar chords are repeated over and over again, the pointless line “If you play the victim, I’ll play the liar” is used at least six times, and to top it all off, the end of the song sounds like it was basically lifted from The Red Jumpsuit Apparatus’ “Face Down.”

The low point of the album is “Give Me Something,” or “the requisite acoustic song.” This is clearly Crash Romeo’s attempt at copying the Plain White T’s song “Hey There, Delilah,” complete with pretentious background violin. It’s even worse, though, because it adds in an electric interlude that sounds like it might have been written by the fictional band No Vacancy from the film “School of Rock.”

Gave Me the Clap is good for what it is – the only problem is that “what it is” is a run-of-the-mill, unoriginal pop-punk album. It tries nothing revolutionary and does nothing new. If you like bands like Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, you’ll like this – but if you prefer something that takes chances and breaks new ground, stay far away.