Motion City Soundtrack

With Commit This to Memory, Motion City Soundtrack has carved a milestone in music history. Behold: the worst rock record you will ever hear. Okay, so that's a pretty strong claim -- after all, the CD's insipid, Weezer-ass- licking-Jimmy Eat World sound is hardly offensive. Tight and spotless, Commit This...

By Jason Heller

June 16, 2005

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With Commit This to Memory, Motion City Soundtrack has carved a milestone in music history. Behold: the worst rock record you will ever hear. Okay, so that's a pretty strong claim -- after all, the CD's insipid, Weezer-ass- licking-Jimmy Eat World sound is hardly offensive. Tight and spotless, Commit This shouldn't be distinguishable from a million other cruddy albums clinging like fly larvae to the corpse of punk. But when it comes to truly sucking, this band is as subtle as it is inspired. Buried within whiney, Moog-smothered songs are hiccups of falsetto cloying enough to make you puke into the back of your throat -- the perfect vocal complement to sub-poetic dreck like "You're all the metaphors I can't create to comprehend this curse that I call love." Seriously, a George Thorogood cover band made up of fifty-year-old welders has more soul and integrity than Motion City Soundtrack. Commit this disc to memory? It's more likely that you'll be gouging out your frontal lobe with your bare fingernails in an attempt to forget you ever heard it.

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