Evermore
Truth of the World : Welcome to the Show
Warner
The Hume brothers, first seen as teenage wunderkinds brought up
on their parents' Led Zeppelin albums, have never been afraid of
overreaching.
More recently, as they became pop stars here, they must have
watched the way low-expectation, teen-market bands such as Panic At
The Disco and Fall Out Boy took the Green Day option and upgraded
to ambitious, high-concept rock theatrics and thought to
themselves, we can do that.
Unfortunately, they can't. Truth Of The World: Welcome To The
Show is a concept album about media and politics that is
shallow of insight and philosophically fuzzy.
That's hardly fatal in concept rock, of course. What cripples
the Humes is the way the musical pilfering — Queen, U2, Green
Day, the Beatles, operetta, Muse, to name a few — is so
ham-fistedly put together.
They don't yet have the skill to wrangle these elements into an
individual shape and their ambition far outstrips their
ability.
Bernard Zuel