Breaking Point

Wind-Up signees Breaking Point are a quartet of post-grungy Tennesseans whose very existence besmirches the hard-living and hard-loving reputation of Southern rock’s glory days. Beautiful Disorder, their sophomore LP, arrives almost a full four years after their halfway decent 2001 debut; and despite louder guitars, slicker production and boss new haircuts, Breaking Point have emerged from their extended hibernation as bland, soulless Seether clones. Any trace of their rough and tumble Southern heritage has been safely excised to ensure maximum commercial appeal. Over the pulverising grunt-rock strains of "Show Me a Sign” and "Don’t Let Go,” vocalist Brett Erickson emotes both passionately and emptily in a standard-issue nü-metal sing/growl, sounding wholly unconvinced by the searching "what’s this life for?” drivel coming out of his mouth. True to formula, "All Messed Up” and "Goodbye to You,” the two Tom Lord-Alge-mixed power ballads, are clogged with more strings than an industrial textile loom, while the rockers are so squeaky-clean they’ve been practically scrubbed raw. Beautiful Disorder is Wind-Up by-the-numbers: hopelessly generic covert Christian arena rock (there’s actually a song called "Promise Keeper”) polished to a showroom shine. So vanilla, it makes Collective Soul look like rough-necked good old boys by comparison.