Waiting for Autumn is a five piece radio rock band from San Diego, California. Their debut album, Now I Know Forever, is also the first album released on upstart SoCal label American Jealousy.
It is a commonly known and seldom discussed fact that the process of cloning is arduous and dark. To make a clone takes hundreds of tries before any success is achieved, and even then success can be temporary. Over 200 eggs went into making Dolly and just as many have been needed for every clone since. Only one clone is ever actually able to be born without being horribly mutated with grotesque defects. It is enough to make one wonder if cloning is actually necessary. We have plenty of sheep, plenty of monkeys, and plenty of people. Why do we need to produce more? The scientific answer is generally "To see if we can." Can a legitimate substitute for an actual, working entity be created entirely through the process of cloning?
When the clone being looked at is Waiting for Autumn, the answer to the question is no. One look at the name lets you know that you're about to hear another band that takes pride in calling themselves emo and playing melodic music with a few awkward and annoying screams thrown in for good measure. One look at the cover art, an illegible letter with a "Love" stamp and "all I have to say is I miss you" written across Polaroid photos of the band in action, lets you know that you've probably seen this album before done by another group when it was trendy to do this type of stuff. One look at the liner notes and your worst fears are confirmed: more pictures of band in action with trite little romantic phrases scrawled across the photos of the members all jumping or screaming or doing something that involves more emotion than full grown men would have been allowed to show in our fathers' day.
And you haven't even heard the band yet. But you don't need to, you know exactly what you're in store for and you know you've heard it before. Whiney melodies placed on top of overproduced music with sped up choruses involving phrases like "I want you to know" screamed in the background just in case you thought these guys were pansies. At 10 songs and 50 minutes the album just seems like too much, it makes you think the band produced it themselves. Oh wait, they did.
Even the press sheet that accompanied the album does little to redeem this radio emo doppelganger. The lead vocalist is Rancid's Lars Frederiksen's cousin. Tell me how that matters at all. The album was engineered by the guys who engineered Blink 182 and the Counting Crows (ok, so that last part is pretty cool). The band is from Southern California. Woo hoo. Oh yeah, and apparently these guys have "an incredibly loyal fan base" (who I'm sure are presently composing hate mail for me). But on their mediocre debut, Waiting for Autumn is nominal at best.
Maybe these guys will prove to be a somewhat successful clone, like Dolly or those Raelian babies or 98 degrees. Even then, though, they will still be nothing more than a clone, something that we've all seen before and is only appealing for its novelty value.
D+
