Makeout Party

Names can say a lot about a band but in the case of Makeout Party, their moniker doesn't. It might suggest sophomoric songs about teenage shenanigans but what the band actually deliver is more interesting. Lengths and Limits is a strange album in that it starts off with the slow building "Sparks," which suggests that this could be an atmospheric, quiet record, and then almost immediately launches into a song that sounds like it could in an episode of The O.C., if it were still around. And maybe if the band realised that it wasn't they might have felt obligated to set the bar a little higher. When Makeout Party manage to shake off the emo-by-numbers, they aren't too bad, with the stronger songs being the slower, moodier ones. But there isn't much about Makeout Party that hasn't been done many times before. And while they do it relatively well, there isn't anything new here and that's their downfall.