partlycloudy, Arm Your Weapons

The press release warns that partlycloudy threatens to dethrone The Ramones and The Clash. That press release should be destroyed. First of all, musically, why would this progressive rock band change any kind of history that The Clash and The Ramones have given us? And even if they were in the same category of sound, the legacies of those two bands don’t have much to worry about. This self-released debut album, Arm Your Weapons, seems a bit overproduced, especially when the band attempts to give off a “defiant hardcore” attitude.

The sound is a little bit like Snapcase, but for some reason this effort doesn’t do much for me. Even the name “partlycloudy” seems so forced (and then, come to find out, their Myspace is filed under “PartlyCloudyRocks”). It seems like the band is trying to scream out how dark, hardcore, and serious they are, but they can’t quite make all the synapses come together in the way they want. Fans of Hawthorne Heights and the like might be into this, though. If they can just tone everything down a little bit, like press and production, they would have a better chance of fitting into the whole nu-Victory-emo sound — I’m guessing that’s what they’re after.