ATP! Album Review: This Century - Biography Of Heartbreak

Albums set for release around this time of year are more or less required to have at least one song that can be blared through a car stereo while driving under the hot summer sun. (Or, if you’re some place that is still getting freak snow storms, blast from your home stereo system after being snowed in.) This Century, however, has managed to create a whole album of songs like the aforementioned with their second studio album Biography of Heartbreak.

Not only do This Century manage to create a whole album of summer songs, but they manage to hit all the summer song highlights and must-haves. ‘Love Killer’ fulfills the need for synthesizer, bass and repetitive chorus about, well, a love killer. ‘Run & Hide’ makes sure to incorporate the bongos and strumed ukelele feel that will most likely give listeners something to bob their head along to. And ‘Sideways’ implements a string section amongst the club beats. On their own, just about every song would have been perfect as the one or two summer songs to make an album worthy of a summer release, but together they all start to blend together.

What could have been a diverse album musically chronicling the beginning, middle and end of heartbreak, seems to have become lost in itself trying to push the envelope as a pop release. It all just sounds like the result of mashing SafetySuit with The White Tie Affair whilst applying the lyrical content of just about any and every pop-rock band who has a bone to pick with love. (Not that’s a terrible thing, mind you. I for one love both those bands and the pop-rock genre.)

In the end, slipping into This Century’s Biography of Heartbreak is like slipping into a well-worn sweater. It’s comforting, it’s nice, it’s familiar but it’s nothing brand new. Not that familiar means bad, because it doesn’t and this Arizona-based band has certainly created a good summer album. But that’s all it is, an album that super fans will undoubtedly love and recreational fans will keep this one blasting through their speakers until the next round of pop comes along.

3/5

Victoria Patneaude

Biography of Heartbreak will be independently released on May 14th via the band’s management, Eighty One Twenty Three.