The Academy Is. . .

With super-sized choruses and the smooth sheen of distorted guitars, the debut from this Chicago emo outfit is tailor made for Warped Tour triumph. But the band's mature songwriting gives them a leg up on the mall punk of their contemporaries, and vocalist William Beckett leaves a distinctively glam aftertaste. "Skeptics and True Believers" makes for an appropriate response to the similarly named "True Believers," by obvious influence the Bouncing Souls.