Emotionalpunk.com
Media Review
Music Quality: 4.0
Production: 6.0
Originality: 3.0
Tracklisting
2. Everything You Dreamed
3. No Words to Say
4. Why Would You?
5. I Haven't Got Much (But I'm Getting Somewhere)
6. Revolution
7. Smalltown Celebrity
8. A Song for the New Year
9. My Hero
10. Goodbye Surrender
11. Chances
“Teenage rock star/ only thirty years old/ where the hell did high school go?/ welcome to high school go” croons Verona Grove on “Small Time Celebrity,” from their new album “The Story Thought Over.” The lyrics, aside from being seemingly unconnected to one another, are a little presumptuous. Is Verona Grove trying to say this is where they’re going to end up? Rock stars at age thirty longing for their youth. Well, one part of it is right: everyone longs for their youth. But will Verona Grove be doing it as rock stars?
Sure, they’re playing the typical pop-punk style that got bands like, oh, let’s name a few: Blink-182, New Found Glory, Fall Out Boy, Good Charlotte, etc, etc, the title rock stars, not to mention a whole lot of cash, but Verona Grove, at this stage, lack a lot the talent that those bands have. The songs on “The Story Thought Over” are okay, lacking any real distinctive hit, often getting lost in the search of that killer hook that makes all the girls sing along and MTV play their video at 5 in the morning. Their lyrics, as is evidenced from the opening line, are not only derivative, but slightly incoherent. They know what they want to say, and how they want to phrase it, but can’t seem to make the two merge together, causing the lyrics to be a disjointed assortment of kind of cool phrases.
The instrumentation is typical, never really finding any authenticity or originality. When you listen to a Blink-182 song, you knew you were listening to Blink. It had that distinctive, almost untuned feeling, to the guitar. The vocals, whether it was Mark or Travis, where undeniably Blink. Verona Grove falls in suit with the ten thousand other pop-punk wannabe bands, not sounding especially different. “The Story Thought Over” has a couple good songs, but not good in the way that makes you play them repeatedly. More like good in the sense that you can listen to them and enjoy them, but after the song ends, there is no real need to ever go back and listen to it again.
If Verona Grove wants to make it in the pop-punk world, they need to step up their game. Right now they have the sound, but who cares? A bunch of other bands have the sound too. The band needs to find a way to distinguish themselves, make their songs memorable, instead of just passing thoughts or side notes to someone’s music collection. Until they do that, there is really no reason to recommend the album, unless you just really need a little sugar-smack pop-punk.