Hitting the ground running off their smashing debut album, The Silence in Black and White, Hawthorne Heights is going from updating their MySpace page to nearly getting a Cribs episode in the amount of time it takes to get an Associate degree. This is really amazing progression in terms of emo. These dudes are in a totally different parallel universe of emo. Pushing the limits of the emo paradigm of romantic tales it makes me wonder how these guys get so much muff. Hawthorne Heights is this year's Taking Back Sunday. JT Woodruff sounds like that guy from Saves The Day. In all seriousness though, it's really hard to sing like this. You have to push the air really hard so it vibrates your nasal cavity to give it the right frequency to turn it into an awesome pitch of poppy-emo douche…extremely difficult. And yes they all have matching haircuts, but at least they don't wear fucking make-up. But enough abusing, if you love this super poppy screamo shit then this probably as good as it gets. But don't these guys know that emo is so last year? I mean come on. The funny thing is that the album contains a song called "We Are So Last Year." Weird. But it's not about the present state of the music industry, no. It's about some bitch that's only humping the band for the green their bringing in. Harsh. "Where Can I Stab Myself in the Ears" is a name of a song and was coincidentally the same question I was asking myself while listening to this stuff. This song has some heavy flow with those masticating Claudio Sanchez "proggy" riffs we all love so much. I couldn't help but think to myself during the final track "Decembers," Holy shit is he really saying this shit? "You don't have to speak because I can hear your heartbeat, fluttering like butterflies searching for a drink, you don't have to cover up how you feel when you're in love." Wow what the fuck. If I said this kind of shit to my girlfriend she'd probably kick me in the nuts. And I'd have it coming.

They say they're post hardcore, but the only thing post and hardcore about it is the dry heaving at the end of the album. Post hardcore vomiting—that works! I suppose they might've been a post-hardcore band for a couple of minutes or so when they were standing at the fork in the road of band evolution. One way went to the emo-pop-screamo-dorko planet and the other I guess went to the post hardcore world. And it's obvious which road they've taken. It's as obvious as the fact that most "post hardcore" bands aren't making as much dough. Post hardcore bands do not make the money. Hawthorne Heights and other bands like this are the fattest cash cows. It's the numbers baby and the numbers don't lie, and numbers are saying that emo is still HOT! And with the hot shit you get the weirdo fashion trends. Teen culture is getting more fucking strange as the days go on. When emo became TRL music I cringed and pleaded that it not be happening. How embarrassing. But whatever, the godfathers of commercial emo pop, Blink 182 started this shit and it looks like it won't be leaving for a while now - no matter how last year it is. But for real man, how lame has this shit gotten over the last four years or so? It started getting weird with The Starting Line and Dashboard Confessional then it morphed into the screamo super-beast with never-ending amounts of bands making it big: Fall Out Boy, Thrice, Taking Back Sunday, My Chemical Romance, THE FUCKING USED, and even AFI (which will probably change their name acronym to mean Ass Feels Infected judging by the strange way things are going). And HH started in 2001, which is perfect timing to get in on this "movement" of sorts. Verdict - Once something gets popular it goes light speed to Tardsville