Bamboo Shoots Will Need Some Armour With An Album Like This

The Bamboo Shoots are yet another band from Brooklyn but unlike most of the hipsters who have made the area hip, The Shoots are far more worldly than their music and are actually made up of several Asian Americans who have Punjabi, Parsi, Gujarati, and Bengali roots. The history of the band begins when they came together in 2004 and gets interesting when on a whim they entered the MTVu Best Music on Campus competition in 2006. Surprisingly, in 2007 they found out they had actually won the contest. Even more surprising was that the contest was the catalyst for the band signing to Epic Records and then immediately heading to the studio to record their debut album entitled Armour.

Pitched as being something a bit alternative and global, the Bamboo Shoots latest album, Armour is anything but. In fact, much of Armour is very mainstream Disney-like pop. It's super slick, super produced, and so utterly gargantuan that no radio station could dare resist this record. That being said, this is a record that doesn't do anything subtly. In fact, the hooks are so big on this record and the choruses so huge that they could reel anything in with ease. It's kind of frightening how well pieced together this whole album is. It's as if, Armour was like a genetically engineered pop record to offer plenty of uptempo and uber-catchy moments as well as just the right amount of highly polished touching ballads to woo all the ladies.

Unfortunately, with all the science involved in making Armour glisten in the sun, and conquer the known universe it seems as though it's lost it's soul. This record is almost as cliche as every Top 40 record out there and it's almost painful to listen to at times. It's put together with such scientific precision and has every sound and move calculated down to where the songs should be and how they should be pitched. It's unfortunate because there's obviously huge amounts of potential with this band. The lead track ("Hey Girl") on the album, for example, is such a ridiculously catchy song that even your mom would be able to sing along to it. Unfortunately, from that moment forward it all goes pear-shaped and just sounds like a completely manufactured album to be pushed toward teenagers.

I'm not sure how or why music like this gets made. This is characterless music that's been run through an assembly line in an effort to seize the brains of unsuspecting listeners. I wish Bamboo Shoots would have made eleven different versions of "Hey Girl," because at least then the album would have been tolerable. Sorry guys, I tried, but I think I'd rather hang out with the skinny jeans crowd then a bunch of Jonas Brothers clones.