White Light Riot

A more appeasing critic could draw on a grab-bag of genres to conflate interest in what White Light Riot does: Britpop would probably factor in, the dubious tag of “prog” would certainly surface, and someone could even dig deep and conjure a post-something. But the fact that’s beaten over the head for the band’s eponymous sophomore album is this: It’s simply a rock band, and a fairly ordinary one.

White Light Riot puts its best foot forward with opener “Wolves In The Night,” the album’s shortest track at two and a half minutes. The song features urgent guitars and frontman Mike Schwandt doing his best Dave Grohl impression. But that’s as aggressive—and as mercifully brief—as WLR gets. The rest of the record follows an almost identical blueprint. We find fiddling intros that segue into building drums. From there gratuitous guitars gnash into a predictably contrived, faux-epic climax about two-thirds though—“Rotation,” “In The Details,” “City Teeth,” and “Heredity” all mimic this arch. It’s the same forced anthemic arithmetic employed by Mumford & Sons, but with more suspect parts summing the whole.

The band’s occasional stylistic switch-ups aren’t necessarily any better. “Queen Of The Boroughs” trades Schwandt’s usual paint-by-numbers rock lyricism for an overwrought narrative on a troubled woman. “My Way Out” sprinkles in some acoustic guitars, but they’re a mere underpinning for the band’s standard headache of interplaying strings. “Building Blocks” is promising, but its understated minimalism is mucked up by a compulsion to add soaring guitars and over-the-top shouts to the tail end of every song. The disc concludes with the cheesy “Good Sport,” which could easily be a Mark Mallman B-side with its hokey keys and chorus refrains.

Despite the clumsy lyricism and painfully formulaic arrangements, White Light Riot isn’t a group of hacks. They’re adept players and not an offensively bad band—unless you’re set off by things sounding completely average. The root problems stem from sub-par, radio-rock influences and Schwandt’s overzealous vocals; he works his pipes like Michael McDonald, and that’s never a good thing. On the self-titled disc, White Light Riot is a cocktail of Maroon 5, Coldplay, and Kings Of Leon. There’s certainly a market for those bands, but the musically adventurous needn’t inquire.