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The Honorary Title

Anything Else But the Truth

By By Ryan Michael McBee |

Thursday, January 27, 2005





In 2002, Brooklyn-based The Honorary Title (Jarrod Gorbel and Aaron Kamstra) took to the road with Teen Beat super-hunk Dashboard Confessional, officially launching them into the emo storm that’s been flooding the TRL countdown and local shopping malls. This album makes it painfully clear why they got the spot; Gorbel even looks like Dashboard, with his strategically-etched star tattoos and oh-so dreamy features. Though Gorbel’s voice is smooth and at times even compelling, the rest of his album wreaks of the desperate horniness that has come to define the emotionally-charged pop scene of late.

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If you want to save yourself 47 minutes, think back to those dudes in high school who couldn’t score and thought if they wrote songs about how they couldn’t score they would score, but didn’t. That is, in a nutshell, Anything Else But the Truth—a well-designed, offensively predictable album, with a crisp, overly produced sound layered in devoid lyrics that express an obvious purpose; landing on the O.C. soundtrack and cashing in on the lucrative side of the Clear Channel music industry; the 11 to 15-year-old demographic. When I sold my promo copy to CD Warehouse they only gave me a dollar which wasn’t even enough to cover the tax on my double-cheeseburger, so if you run you might be able to get it for a reduced price, but I wouldn’t recommend it. Recommended for fans of Dashboard, John Mayer, ABBA or crap.

Grade: D

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