Plain White T's review

From Clevescene:

The Plain White T's
Big Bad World
(Fearless/Hollywood)

Since the runaway success of 2006's coffeeshop-acoustic single "Hey There Delilah," making the case that Plain White T's frontman Tom Higgenson is anything other than a sensitive, nice-dude wuss can be a tough sell. After all, pop-punk lite tunes about mooning over chick crushes are his specialty; check the rest of 2006's Every Second Counts for the softee-imitation Green Day/Weezer/Jimmy Eat Word evidence. "Delilah" was a lucky aberration for the Plain White T's, a fluke that finally made the public-at-large pay attention - a lot like Sugar Ray's 1997 smash "Fly" in context of that band's early gross-out metal.

So Big Bad World, naturally, panders predictably, while positing Higgenson as a fame-drunk cad who's fending off that dastardly playa impulse when he isn't dispensing romantic or motivational boilerplate. "Someday we'll all reach higher/Someday we won't be so tired/Someday we won't say never," he generalizes emptily on "Someday," which purports, in its polyharmonic soar and dewy, mid-tempo sweep, to be an "Imagine"/"I'd Like to Teach the World" admixture for 2008. Worse still, the band transmorphs into a latter-day Monkees for "That Girl," pissing ecstatic onamonapia all over sunny-side chordage in service of a kicky li'l number about love - and orgasms - at first sight. While the cloyingly chipper title track encourages us to keep plugging away at overcoming our chronic mistakes, Maroon 5 rip-off "Natural Disaster" waxes mindless-tryst celebratory. Then Higgenson is genuflecting waist-deep in orchestra-pit musical-theatre cheese, begging God to forgive him for a "Serious Mistake," a weak, insincere stab at a template Say Anything would've nailed with verve, sass and wit to spare. Suddenly, "Delilah" no longer seems so intolerably banal. - Ray Cummings