Boyce Avenue: A Musical Street Worth Turning On?

Is there anything that Boyce Avenue doesn’t try to rip off? When your biggest claim to fame is that you kind of sound like The Goo Goo Dolls who look kind of like The Jonas Brothers doing covers of Taylor Swift, then you probably should just give up.
Boyce Avenue is a group of three touchy-feely hipster brothers with nothing real to say. Their YouTube account is overflowing with acoustic, heart tugging versions of popular pop songs by the likes of Swift, Katy Perry, Bruno Mars, and Pink, as if they want to show the world that if you strip away the electronic beats and auto-tuned nonsense then you might get something real and raw. Sorry, guys: there’s a reason its called “pop.” First it’s there, floating high and fast, but then it vanishes into thin air and is nothing more than a fleeting, flickering memory of drug-induced club thumpers. 

In between they’ve got original songs that they themselves have recorded, which all sound like they locked themselves in a room with your usual guitar, drums, and bass, and power chorded their way through painfully cliche lyrics that we’ve all heard before in other look-at-how-sensitive-I-am bands right before they plunge into obscurity after their all-too-long fifteen minutes of fame. If they think that their half a million subscribers and over fourteen million channel views is something to boast about, I would simply warn them of the Rebecca Black effect. Their lyrics don’t quite approach the insanity of “Which seat can I take?,” but they come dangerously close with “You showed him all the best of you/But I’m afraid your best wasn’t good enough” on the track Broken Angel. In this day and age, just because you have views, “likes,” and fans, doesn’t mean people think you’re any good.

If you feel that you must listen to this type of music and are looking for a band less stupid, then I suggest you spend your time on an artist like Schaeffer, which hails from right here in our backyard of Troy, MI (some of the members can also be seen in The Victorious Secrets, the new band for freecreditscore.com’s ad campaign). Schaeffer uses power chords and your typical soaring rock-feel, but they pursue in their music real truths, using for one of their records the never-boring technique of a concept album to bolster feelings of loss, love, and faith that don’t quite rise into the upper echelons of art, but do a good job hanging out on the middle tier. As for Boyce Avenue, I have nothing more to say. Anybody can strum on a guitar while sitting on a stool under soft, moody lighting being filmed with their friend’s slightly above consumer high definition camera, crooning soothingly into a microphone to try and melt your girlfriend’s heart. Let The Goo Goo Dolls do it better, and The Jonas Brothers stare into the lens all seductively on their own. We don’t need you to be a second rate version of any of that.

Written by :

Phil Sieb