Review Summary: Rotation is an album that is bland and emotionless. Not an ounce of effort is present on this sophomore release.
Typically, when one starts to read a review about an album or band they expect to hear a long, well-worded paragraph about the history and information about the band. If that is what you are looking for here, I am sorry but you are going to be very disappointed; not because I, your humble writer of this review, do not have the time or not because I do not have the ambition to tell you about Cute Is What We Aim For’s history. No, I am not going to because frankly there is nothing to tell. Cute Is What We Aim For has no history despite having two albums out; they are not controversial nor are they from an interesting background. They are a bland power-pop band, that are much more cliché pop than power. Unfortunately this packaged and branded style of music comes in two parts, the first was the band’s debut album,
The Same Old Blood Rush With A New Touch, which displayed average musical talent at best. Part two comes as the bands sophomore release,
Rotation, which was somehow a mile and a half worse than the previous, this is to bad for the band because their debut was no work of art to begin with. Maybe musical talent is not what the band was after at all though, I bet ‘cute’ is what they really aim for.
If only you readers could have been there…when I finally got my copy of
Rotation, my fingers shaking with excitement as I slowly trace the beautiful butterfly figure on the cover, I look close and notice that the butterfly is shaped by a bunch of seemingly random and pointless images, but I pay no attention to that. I ignore the mediocre artwork, as I am too excited to hear what magnificent music awaits my ears in this album…that is not all what happened, but that’s beside the point…I clumsily opened the case and placed the disk in the player. As the album begins playing, this is what I hear the first single, “Practice Makes Perfect” begin. The weak electric guitar attempts to start things with a really dreamy feel too it, but ultimately fails as no emotion is conveyed at all, even the lead singer, Shaant Hacikyan, fails to make any movement with his nasally vocals that flow very roughly through the song and the nonexistent chorus. The only thing this song is good for is to have featured on the MTV reality show, The Hills, which is exactly where it made its debut. A horrible song paralleled by an equally ***ty television program, at least Cute Is What We Aim For knows their place.
After “Practice Makes Perfect” finally draws to a close, the listener of
Rotation is greeted by a completely out of place laughing of a child, and this starts off the song “Doctor.” This song is probably the only decent song on
Rotation, but that’s still not saying much as it is still weak. The only plus it has is the guitar work that is a vast improvement from the previous song. Singing about things like “being your doctor” and “being your cure” is an overused and meaningless subject though that just makes me wonder what exactly the message behind this song is. Why would I want you to be my doctor? My cure for what? This is the last thing that you will be thinking about though when “Navigate Me” begins, then only that this song conveys is child molestation. With excessive amounts of drumming and extra noises cannot hide the repeated line “This is where we both get scared/Navigate me through your body/I love the way you dive upon me,” lyrics oddly sexual for a band that is targeted towards young teens. I guess it makes them feel rebellious.
Rotation makes me question a lot of things like, what is this or that song about? Or why the hell am I listening to this? When it really comes down too it though this album is really nothingness, there is no emotion or a meaning behind it all, the band obviously did not pure their heart and soul into this like they should as every song is lazy and just plain background noise. They even wasted time to include a forty-two second song called “Untitled” with no music, just vocals and an irritating clicking noise. Regardless, whatever the band was aim for, they failed, they are not cute nor are they good musically in anyway. Maybe more slack would be given if this had been their debut album, but the fact that this is the bands sophomore effort makes Cute Is What We Aim For irrelevant in every way they can be.
