Reviews

Most people mainly know Hawthorne Heights from the highly publicized lawsuit between the band and Victory Records. During the two years of internet fighting, most people appeared to forget about Hawthorne Heights. Now with Fragile Future, their third release, the band has come back with a whisper rather than a shout.

I'll admit I enjoyed "Niki FM," the single off their first LP The Silence in Black and White, but I think a lot of my appreciation for that single was the dichotomy of the quiet verses and the screaming chorus. Fragile Future sounds like Hawthorne Heights are afraid to really to go beyond their safe place. Singer JT Woodruff doesn't even sound as if he's singing. It sounds like he's talking in a higher pitch and spends most tracks with a monotone voice.

The instrumentals are tracked well and the mix is good, but the music itself is a little boring. There isn't anything you haven't heard on any of the other two releases. I would recommend just staying with their debut album and not venturing any further. At one point, Hawthorne Heights were an MTV band with their videos playing whenever MTV actually played music, but with the two-year lapse of music, it sounds like the band is playing 2006 to a 2008 crowd.

There aren't any outstanding tracks, nothing I would see as a single that would grab the attention of the listeners who used to wear the shirts and have the posters. With some tracks like "Corp of Corpses," "Four Became One," and "Sugar in the Engine," it doesn't sound like there is much substance in the songs themselves.

Hawthorne Heights is a band that has its fans that will never leave...until they graduate middle school. They had time to evolve their sound, even with the tragic death of their bassist, but it sounds like they retreated into a happy place and reproduced the same sound that they covered on their previous releases.