Album Details

• Artist: Boys Like Girls
• Album: Love Drunk
• Label:
• Year of Release: 2009
• ME Rating:
• Reviewed by: kev_stev on 2009-09-05

Love Drunk is the second album from pop-punkers Good Charlotte, I mean, Boys Like Girls.  Well, the second album proves that the names are virtually interchangeable, though Boys Like Girls make great strides to defy the naysayers who claim that Good Charlotte might be the worst band ever.

Love Drunk deserves its praise towards BLG for ripping off, and maybe even ruining, Good Charlotte's music: these guys missed their true calling by taking up musicianship instead of butchery.  The album is so bombastic and inane that it tires me to give it repeated listens; it is literally painful to listen to, beginning with the overproduced and auto-tuned "Heart Heart Heartbreak," which tries extra hard to be anthemic but cannot match a maturity level beyond the Radio Disney demographic.

The opening track starts with gurgling auto-tune as lead singer Martin Johnson gushes his angsty platitudes, "Headed for a heart, heart, heartbreak / I'm gonna, gonna turn around and walk away."   The profundity continues with "Love Drunk," the album's first single, which already had over 8 million listens on Myspace, which I hope, for the benefit of our civilization, is an enormous computational error. 

The song is outrageously repetitive, apparently trying to see how many times they can say "I used to be love drunk" in less than 4 minutes, while making the pop-single template (verse-chorus-verse, etc.) seem even more stale than it already is.  The auto-tuned (or, at least, vocoder'd) vocals also give the song a heavy feeling of insincerity: music can be embellished but should never be this clean-cut; the entire album is almost neurotically spotless.

Maybe if Love Drunk is meant for a much younger audience it can have some merit for being marketed successfully at its target-group.  Judging from the band's pictures, it seems that they have larger interests than making a musically moving album anyway; they seem to cling to the bad-boy emo appeal, perfect for the tweens who are just too cool for the Jonas Brothers but not quite jaded enough to listen to their older brother's Hawthorne Heights' CD.

But solely on a sonic level, this album is so unimpressive as a whole I do not know what is harder to accomplish: finding something musically worthwhile within it or continuing to listen in search that something bearable will appear.  The most incredibly painful songs are the slower tracks, like "Someone Like You," which is plunged with emotional vapidity, although Johnson tries to disguise his half-interest through his whiny bawls.  The song comes and goes (in what feels like a lifetime) but is musically static, and is ultimately a colossal waste of 4 minutes of album time.

And then there is the next slated single, "She's Got a Boyfriend Now," which sounds like your favorite Good Charlotte song, placing smooth synths, crunchy guitars, and smoothly produced, bi-layered vocals in a sunny and overall insipid track laden with "woah-oh" chants.   With such trite elements, Boys Like Girls make crafting a pop song seem like an effortless endeavor-though not in a good way.  There music is irritating, overused, and unnecessary, further clogging the mainstream airwaves with more pre-adolescent nonsense.

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