Heart Attack

Pittsburgh's Vacancy pride themselves on being a hard-working band, and good for them. The problem is that working hard is no guarantee of success, and a good hook from a lazy band is preferable to a bunch of carefully crafted but musically dry bombast from a hard-working one. What you get from the Vacancy is lots of the latter and precious little of the former. The complete lack of decent tunes on their full-length debut wouldn't be such a problem if they weren't obviously trying to write tunes: "Anthem" is clearly trying to be catchy, and so is the album's lead track, "In the Backseat" (which also features the probably self-deluding couplet "Everything she said was a lie/To get me into bed"). Neither one of them quite achieves that goal, though "Anthem" gets close toward the end as the twin guitars and guest keyboard kick in. The band actually gets closest to success when it abandons all pretense of popcraft and kicks out the post-punk jams on "Get Up! Get Out!" and "Another Runner in the Night." "Hey There" builds up a pretty good head of steam as well, though again, it gets over by just letting go and flailing. Not bad, but far from essential.