and now for the important things...

and we all know what important things i'm referring to, right? right. because we all know that i would only ever use my precious subject line to refer to midtown, their songs, my ongoing devotion to them, and/or current project to keep reviewing their albums in order to get you to like them.

today we're covering album two, aka 'living well is the best revenge'. it's kind of ironic that i'd be covering my least favorite of their albums on my least favorite day this month, but...oh well. although you should understand that my least favorite midtown album is approximately equivalent in terms of musical love/squee factor with my second favorite kings of leon album (only by the night, in case you were wondering), just to keep things in perspective. i just thought i should share that since i realized today that since most of you have met me in the midst of one of my overexcited, new-band-discovery periods (and it doesn't really matter if that band was cutie and co., panic!, cobra starship, or better than ezra because that initial period of excitement is pretty much the same no matter what), you probably haven't really been exposed to my love of all things midtown yet. mostly because that was always in the back of my head, just below the beatles and just above britney spears, but never really something i felt the need to fangirl over (well, until now, obviously). and now that we have some context for this, onto the review.

well, okay, it's not much of a review because i'm not much of a reviewer. my main problem with this album is how overproduced it sounds. also, gabe's vocals on a lot of these songs seem different to the other albums (or even his pre-vocal cyst stuff with cobra). his voice isn't necessarily bad, not at all. more like generic. he sounds like every other singer in a pop-punk band (besides tom, who will never be equalled). like i said, overproduced. the good? just about everything else.

favorite song: like a movie. the lyrics in this are great and it's such a great car song. in case you couldn't tell, that's pretty high praise from me (especially since there are days when it feels like i was born with a car seat welded to my butt).

other highlights:

1. get it together, for the intro, mostly, but also because after dances i like to put this song on while i'm in the bathroom and listen to gabe saporta tell me to 'take off your makeup, honey' while i'm...taking my makeup off. i don't know, i'm easily amused, okay?
2. you should know. this is definitely a lyrics song to me. i don't know enough about music to comment on the arrangements on this song beyond saying that it sounds like a simplified and slowed down version of blink, but the lyrics and gabe's voice on this (which is less polished than on the rest of the songs) filled all of my 'reasons i like midtown' ticky boxes. besides, what's not to love in a song that's telling us that 'it's safe to fall if you just trust the ground you stand on'?
3. become what you hate/in the songs. okay, so these are two songs, but i like them both for the same reason, which is that they're all about midtown's record label (which they left after this album). it's fun for context/being spitefully happy that they ditched drive thru records in time to make 'forget what you know' independently (and awesomely, without any of the crazy 'sound like bands X, Y, & Z' directives that had to be responsible for this album).

so that was 'living well is the best revenge'. stay tuned for 'save the girl, lose the world'.