Review: Desoto Jones - Aurora

Posted on 3 September 2008 | 1 Comment

Filed Under: Album Reviews, Just Plain Rock, Pop

--

If you are going to listen to overwrought and overarching modern emo tunes, you could do much better but also a lot worse than Desoto Jones and their debut album Aurora. With hooks and melodies galore it falls somewhere between All Time Low, The Juliana Theory, and Dashboard Confessional (wow, I make this sound terrible). Yeah, for all the descriptors here I’m not really fooling anyone; this is really just pop music that could easily be on the radio next to Taking Back Sunday, Jimmy Eat World or something like that. Yeah. Radio rock. Big time glossy arena-sized radio rock. Fuck, this could be what the Jonas Brothers sound like in a few years after they’ve outgrown their current Disney audience. Again, I’m not kidding.

What Aurora is is a collection of soaring melodic pop rock songs with just enough so-called post-hardcore influences that it won’t be instantly tossed aside by jaded music writers like me. Not instantly, but soon enough. Big crashing drums, shards of atmospheric guitar riffing, and melodic vocals that are all well executed, but still. With all of the really great stuff that Deep Elm has been putting out recently, this is a bit suspect. The production aims big and sounds almost silly and over-the-top at times but hey, this will appeal to plenty of music fans. I’m not really one of them. I’ve always been a fan of Deep Elm, but this just seems like the antithesis of their early releases.

MP3 | Desoto Jones – Giant Magnets Aurora
MP3 | Desoto Jones – Speed Bump Aurora

Comments

1 TJ - 91 days ago

Desoto Jones played at my school last April. I had pretty much the same reaction to their music as you did, but I’ll give them this; they put on one hell of a live show.