Young kids are very impressionable, especially when it comes to music. Give an 8th grader a 311 album and the poor adolescent might think it is cool to mix rock and rap and reggae and smoke a whole lot of pot. Or perhaps if you buy a young teenager a Nickelback CD he may actually think it is neat to sound like you have a hernia when you sing and smoke a whole lot of weed. I think the guys in Pachinko were also young impressionable youth when they recorded Weatherfield. Growing up in the age of emo, they are under the terribly wrong assumption that it is perfectly acceptable to ape the sound of their favorite bands, such as [insert emo band here]. Now, I have no trouble taking parts of a quality band's sound and making it your own, but these guys have been listening to the wrong bands. Weatherfield is probably, at best, an average record. Inserting the required sing-whine for emotion and start-stop song structures Weatherfield is an exercise in a type of music that has been done before and has now lost all feeling. If you need comparisons for this band, try an 18-year-old Chris Carrabba singing a run of the mill emo song. Pachinko is going to get better, they are young. Pretty soon, they are going to start listening to Nick Cave and Jonathan Richman, or maybe even 16 Horsepower and they are going to improve.
Editors' ratings — Doug 2.5/5, Lonny 2/5
