It's a bad sign for a band when their chief musical dilemma is whether they should go with glitter, or with fishnet. It's not that one should expect a post-hardcore/emo band to be Shakespearean in their songwriting, but Hawthorne Heights seem to be obsessed with image to the point of absurdity. Just look at the marketing campaign that launched this album, in an age of mammoth advertising budgets for so-called "alternative" music, it was still ridiculously overblown. "If Only You Were Lonely" seems to be just a small part of the overall "Hawthorne Heights" brand. I wouldn't be surprised to see official lunchboxes and backpacks with the band's name on it in stores soon.

I firmly believe that for an album to be any good, it has to succeed as either a piece of art, or a pop album. The very best albums even manage to succeed at both at the same time. Predictably enough, "If Only You Were Lonely" is a colossal failure on both points, for a variety of reasons. But to compound matters, not only is the record crap, it also sounds incredibly cynical and engineered. It's fair enough to fail on your own, but to fail when you're doing the bidding of some evil music corporation, and have their tremendous resources behind you, is unforgivable.

This attitude throughout the album is largely the reason that this is art. This album has no pretension of being art, it's product, and it knows it. Lyrics like "Saying goodbye is the hardest part/Wish we knew this from the start" and "This dead letter/ Written on black paper/It never found your eyes" can only be described as really awful. Instrumentally this album isn't that interesting either, featuring the standard roaring guitar, screamed lyrics, and clockwork drumming that by this stage, are more likely to induce sleep than excitement. This might have been interesting in 1996, but come on guys, it's the 21st century now!

As pop, this is pretty awful as well. Pop music doesn't have to have brilliant lyrics, but the lyrical turds described above certainly don't help matters. The way that every song here sounds practically the same and has the same structure means that this album gets very boring, very quickly. You could rearrange the songs on this album in any order, and it'd probably be difficult to tell the difference. Everything is just a flat, featureless plain of overproduced emo-punk, and this means that there are no highlights, nothing to look forward to on the album.

This criticism may sound harsh, but the fact of the matter is that Hawthorne Heights doesn't have to fail. Bands like My Chemical Romance and their ilk show that it's still possible to do something interesting with the emo formula, even if the genre sometimes seems to be almost entirely played out. Unfortunately, on "If Only You Were Lonely", the formula is strictly adhered to, which means that there's no real reason to buy this album. The bottom line is, everything on this album has already been done better elsewhere.