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 has 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.