Test Your Reflex

Test Your Reflex cook up pop melodies flavored with alt rock experimentation, honing their very own spacey sound. It's a sound that's catchy, and at the same time, refreshing. Their RCA debut, The Burning Hour, channels The Shins' indie sensibility as well as the warm, fuzzy guitar tones of early Smashing Pumpkins. It's a tasty cornucopia of sounds that separates the Los Angeles quintet from the countless other young rock bands trying to find a happy medium between "arena" and "open mic." The album kicks off with the infectious hooks and quick build of "I'm Not Sorry." The record then segues into "Pieces of the Sun" and "Thinking of You," which embrace epic guitar resonances, while allowing singer Ryan Levine's voice to soar.

Test Your Reflex work, because they break with convention. Andrew Ampaya's keyboards have a dreamy, ethereal feel, while Clark's guitar playing crunches out hook after hook. The band will definitely evolve over time as their songwriting "reflexes" evolve more, but it will come. An indication of that comes on the album's 7-minute last track, "Painted Red," a more somber cut. Over the course of the song, the band traverses an entire soundscape that encompasses a diverse range of sounds from drone-y distortion to melodic keys. If anything, it points to a bright future. Test Your Reflex have found the right hour to burn.

—Rick Florino
04.07.08

The good news, The Burning Hour isn't going to make you think much. You can put it on and be completely untroubled by any unique musical ideas or atonal sounds. No unexpected chord changes or lyrics stand out. Unfortunately, despite a few catchy hooks and decent production, the overabundance of unoriginality ultimately makes the album forgettable. Although Test Your Reflex likely have underlying talent, you have to dig past their façade to notice. It's easier to believe that these are kids pretending to be the Killers and playing '80s cover songs without a hint of amusing irony. "Thinking of You" marks an obvious attempt at sounding like the Cure, "I Know You're Lonely" starts with a keyboard tone pulled from a Cyndi Lauper ballad, and "I Am Alive" sounds like it could have been written for Corey Hart until the big sparkling guitars come in for the heavily compressed chorus. Even the guitar parts and tones were directly ripped off from the repertoires of other bands (most notably U2). The lyrics are mind-numbingly cliché and consistently predictable with ambiguous bits about staring at the wall, running around in circles, and most often, being unloved ("All along I've tried to hide, afraid that you would see right through me, all the pain and tears I've cried.") TYR seems to be a manufactured band created for commercial appeal, rather than a band that's making music for the love of the craft. The good news is that the songs are catchy enough, and all five members have expensive-looking haircuts and pretty headshots in the CD liner notes, so they should soon find some female admirers to help them through the longing and loneliness inherent in so many of their songs. ~ Jason Lymangrover, All Music Guide