Scenes from a Movie - The Pulse CD

Debut from West Virginia Pop Punks Borrows from Fall Out Boy

Aug 6, 2007

Pop punk band Scenes from a Movie's debut CD The Pulse sounds too much like Panic! At The Disco and Fall Out Boy to warrant major interest.

Born from the friendship of high school friends Tony Bush and Jon Ewing, West Virginian rockers Scenes from a Movie have filled out into a full-blown 5-piece rock band that immediately brings to mind emo favourites Panic! at the Disco and Fall Out Boy, even down to the pained vocals and chord structure of the songs on The Pulse, the band’s full-length debut.

Despite citing influences as hard-edged as Metallica and NOFX on their list of musical scholarship, the sound of Scenes from a Movie is as far removed from these bands as you could find. Although lead track Just Ask Us opens with a reasonably heavy riff, as soon as the vocals join the fray it’s straight into familiar pop punk territory a la Fall Out Boy, with a dance rock feel that Pete Wentz would be proud of, with singer Bush sounding a dead ringer for Patrick Stump.

Scenes from a Movie Lack Originality

This all-too identical approach continues with next song Save You, which tries to veer off in a slightly different musical direction with its hook-laden chorus that wouldn’t be out of place on the last Sherwood release. Yet again the vocals of Bush keep tearing you away to that band of Wentz’s, and it’s a disconcerting feeling – it’s hard to look at Scenes from a Movie as anything else than a slightly poorer copy of everything that’s come before.

That’s not to say that The Pulse is a complete loss – despite the vocals constantly succeeding in making you think you’ve heard it all before, there is the odd gem amongst the 11 songs on offer here. Heartbeat from Hell offers an almost Mexicana feel to begin with, its strummed electric acoustic invoking images of a lost Clint Eastwood soundtrack, before merging into a classy pop rock chorus that seems destined for college radios countrywide, whilst Goodbye Reckless is a lilting power ballad that offers a brighter future than the rest of the album suggests.

Newer Pulse Needed for this Scene

However, 2 songs do not a great album make – they don’t even make a good album, and this is a problem that Scenes from a Movie doesn’t seem to have the answer to yet. Yes, they are a young band with the average age of the quintet no more than in the early 20’s, yet there are many bands of a similar age with far more assured debuts.

If they can pull away from the Fall Out Boy and Panic! at the Disco sound that these 2 bands do so much better, they might just do enough to warrant a second album – at the moment, though, Scenes from a Movie is one of the bands to be filed under mix tape fodder.

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