Cool For August: Grand World

Cool For August has been the recipient of plentiful advance hype and promotional attention, but it's hard to imagine anyone getting too excited about the L.A. band's derivative, predictably emotive debut. You know the formula by now: Each song is an urgent, melodramatic epic marked by swollen choruses and the throaty warbling of singer Gordon Vaughn. It's listenable, to be sure, but mostly because it's so crushingly familiar; you've been inundated with this sort of heavy-handed bleating on the radio for years now. It's no wonder the happy-go-lucky bubble-gum pop of Hanson is taking the country by storm right now: People seem ready to cheer up, and Cool For August is the last thing they want or need to hear blasting out of car windows on a sunny day.