Hit-making potential

Reviewed April 2008

Brandenton, Florida's We the Kings is a young (late teens to early 20s) alt/power pop quartet that shows a ton of talent on their self-titled debut. Lead singer Travis Clark has a nice voice, and the band plays with a tight cohesiveness in an alt-rock sort of groove. Further, the 11 songs the band wrote are all nice enough, with several ("Secret Valentine," "Check Yes Juliet") having real hit potential. But the production is so satiny, so sanitized that very little personality comes through. The album as a whole sounds more like the creation of the producers than the band's members. The result is competent but unremarkable music that sounds like nothing so much as every other recent alt-pop band of the past few years.

Review by Jim Trageser. Jim is a writer and editor living in Escondido, Calif., and was a contributor to the "Grove Press Guide to Blues on CD" (1993) and "The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Blues" (2005).