Whether it’s the brightly colored mesh of pastel shades against a white background that adorns Movement’s album cover, or the trite song titles that grace the back of it, it’s easy to tell what type of music you’re getting yourself into long before you ever insert this disc into your CD player. In typical punk rock fashion, Thieves and Villains shed just about any form of musical depth they may have been musing about and instead present us with straight forward, in your face, power pop. The songs here are all show, with little substance.
Each tune you’ll find on Movement is polished to perfection; and for those who still like punk rock, you just might find this disc enjoyable upon first listen. But Movement is shallow music of the worst kind; beneath the soaring guitar licks and the coming of age, dare I say ‘emo’ lyrics, there’s really nothing new to be found here. It’s depthless music, the all too often story of the album that finds its way into people’s homes, only to wind up collecting more than it’s fair share of dust.
On Movement, Thieves and Villains play it safe. Guitarist Chris Pennings puts little thought into his all too forgettable guitar work, while the rest of the band subsequently falls in line behind him creating an amazingly generic listen. There are times on the album that the band seems as if they’re going to break out of the shallow little shell they’ve built for themselves. Hidden under layers of unnecessary gloss, there lie shades of another, more attractive side to the band’s sound. The slowed down groove of “Everyone Believes” is far more appealing just about everything else the album has to offer. “World’s Apart” on the other hand is lagged down by sappy lyrics penned and sung by frontman Sergio Otaegui, but is helped tremendously by a refreshing touch of acoustic guitar.
Apart from these exceptions though, they aren’t many things that Thieves and Villains do get right on their debut album. The band all too often falls into musical clichés, their lyrics being one the biggest. Otaegui’s abhorrently overwrought, and sometimes down right childish poetry is chalk full of feather light high school emotion that lacks any type of true character. While Otaegui and Pennings can hit their notes vocally, I never really felt any type of actual emotion in their voices. The two vocalists end up blending together after awhile, sadly becoming every other singer this genre has ever seen.
Though Thieves and Villains may offer a temporary distraction for true fans of the now stale genre, the complete lack of any type of real substance on Movement won’t have them listening for long. This is the kind of album that will flood bargain bins and be used by curious kids to test what a microwave might do to a CD. Hopefully I’ve made myself clear by now; Movement is an album you should probably stay away from.
