Friday, November 20, 2009

Hero's for Hire

It’s not often we’re compelled to talk about radio friendly pop punk bands, but there is an inspired one coming out of East Granby, of all places. Yes, East Granby, one of Connecticut’s many quiet towns hardly known for pumping out rock bands. Charlie Diamond fronts Hero's for Hire, a project he works hard to make both purposeful and fun. Currently a student at UConn, Charlie has been playing with bassist Dave Morris, a student at Central, and drummer Vince Caiafa, for a couple of years now. To date they’ve put out two relatively polished releases, “Montazuma's Revenge” and “RedShift”. While Charlie admits that his influences are far from what would be deemed underground or indie (The Cure, The Beatles, U2, Fall Out Boy), the band is much closer to an easygoing brand of Piebald-styled emo. Most importantly, though, they totally avoid the lame posturing of their commercially-minded brethren. “My philosophy is music for a cause,” explains Charlie, “I think music is very powerful and I hope I can change some things or at least bring some things to light.” For us jaded types, this statement might ring hollow, but we’d all do better to encourage such positive sentiments than dismiss them. Not only are Hero's for Hire pretty good at what they do, they’re not part of that phony breed of industry packaged crap that focuses on sartorial appearances over musical content. And even if the sincere enthusiasm behind Hero's for Hire doesn’t launch them into orbit over night, it will at very least help them to continue to grow musically and achieve the success they’re after.

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