Review: Dirty Projectors: Slaves’ Graves and Ballads (2004)

Amber Coffman and Angel Derodoorian aren’t on Slaves’ Graves and Ballads. Let me say that again, Coffman and Derodoorian aren’t on Slaves’ Graves and Ballads. So no, there aren’t any experimental R&B tracks like “Stillness is the Move” on here, or any female vocals in general. In fact, if it wasn’t for Dave Longstreth’s Anthony Kiedis-like nasal sneer, you would probably have not known this was the Dirty Projectors. This album was before Dirty Projectors was anything more than Longstreth’s personal musical project, a time when the band was more indulgent and less quirky. If you thought Orca Bitte was a little too abstract for your taste, then Slaves’ Graves would be an even bigger challenge for you. But hey, at least you can appreciate its experimentation.

Baroque-pop make up the first half of Slaves’ Graves and Ballads. At first, it feels like a soundtrack to a pretentious student art film, as “Somberly, Kimberly” opens the album with a spoken word track played over drums and xylophone. After the opener, though, Longstreth settles in, allowing a majestic chamber ensemble to back him up. To describe the music of this half, imagine if an avant-garde musician decided to compose Romantic music. The strings and woodwinds sound straight from the 19th century, maybe something from Beethoven or Dvorak, but it’s all made weird thanks to abrupt tonal shifts and Longreth’s off-key singing. “(Throw On) Hazard Lights” begins with oboes, then gives way to an acoustic guitar song before ending with blaring, volume busting woodwinds. “We Are Swaddled” features strings mixed with out-of-tune harmonized vocals. There is even a moment of levity in “Slaves’ Graves,” where romantic, pastoral strings and flutes nicely compliment Longstreth’s crooning. Despite this wide variety, I actually have a hard time pointing out one track that stands out; they all sound equally scatterbrained and dangerous.

The chamber piece “Hazard Lights (reprise)” marks the album’s transition to a quieter, cozier and more barren sound. This is where the ballads in the album title come in, with soft, mostly acoustic (“Because Your Light is Turning Green” and “This Weather” have electric guitars) lo-fi folk songs. This is definitely the stronger half, because where in the first half, Longstreth hid behind dense, cold, abstract arrangements, the second half has him front and center, singing over more accessible music. You can feel Longstreth’s emotions as he toils through his laments. “A Labor More Restful” and “Unmoved” set the tone of the second half with a sad, track featuring nothing more than Longstreth and his acoustic guitar. “Ladies, You Have Exiled Me” is also another acoustic track, but this time it’s accompanied by cricket chirps. Slow, lush electric guitars bring a wonderfully somber tone to “This Weather,” enhanced more with a gloomy trumpet.

Having the advantage of reviewing this album 8 years after its release, Slaves’ Graves and Ballads comes off as kind of boring, sluggish and humorless compared to more recent Dirty Projectors albums such as Orca Bitte. The absence of any female vocals, or anything immediate such as “Stillness is the Move” or “Gun Has no Trigger,” also didn’t help this album’s cause. It took a couple more listens before I was able to enjoy the interesting juxtaposition of romantic music and experimentation in the first half and the somber tracks of the second half. Many Dirty Projectors albums are growers, but this album especially requires more listens.

Grade: 7/10

Review: Jason Aldean: My Kinda Party (2010)

Guess who was the best-selling independent artist between 2009 and 2011. No, it wasn’t Vampire Weekend or Arcade Fire (sorry indie rock, you still have a long way to go). It was country artist Jason Aldean. In fact, his most recently released album (and subject of this review) My Kinda Party was not only the best-selling independent album of 2011, it was the fourth best-selling album of 2011, period. Who said you needed to be on a major label to be popular? You just need to know your audience, and there’s a massive audience for some good old country pop.

But enough chatter of Aldean’s label situation. My Kinda Party might be independently released, but if you’ve ever listened to a Top 40 focused country band such as Lady Antebellum, then Aldean’s music would mostly sound very familiar to you. It’s mostly a bunch of safe, blue-collar ditties dealing with relationships, nostalgia and the common folk of ‘Merica’s interiors. You can just feel the Georgia red clay, the heartbreak and the anti-elitism. OK, maybe that last part is something you don’t hear on pop radio, and yes, that populism does get distracting. “Country Boy’s World” follows the sojourn of a guy who proudly shows off his favorite places in the deep south to a hesitant, urban-raised Jersey girl, name dropping small towns such as Paris, Tennessee and Florence, Alabama in the process. “Fly Over States” wallows in a us-vs-them attitude, singing “they’d [referring to LA and NYC residents] understand why God made those fly over states” while celebrating those hard farmers in the Midwest and so on and so forth. Talk about subtlety. It’s Lee Greenwood all over again on these songs.

It’s a good thing these eye-rolling small-town anthems are only a minority, for almost the rest of the album is made up of simple heartfelt songs. Imagine a bunch of Lady A’s “Need You Now”s. It sounds safe and pretty, even with Aldean’s ungraceful, twangy voice, thanks to the lush guitar slides and organs. But as someone who appreciates the experimentation of Wilco or the earnestness of Johnny Cash, My Kinda Party feels too tame, superficial and boring for me to be invested. These country pop ballads saturate so much of this album’s 56 minute run time with sentimental goo that it starts to become a repetitive, constrained slog. Even Kelly Clarkson’s guest vocals for the bombastic, string driven “Don’t You Wanna Stay” weren’t enough to make the song memorable, as she sounded completely anonymous and contained. I appreciate the prettiness, but could you be a little more dangerous Mr. Aldean? Well, there I go, being one of those snooty elitist “Fly Over States” rails against.

As I implied earlier, not everything on here are Lite-FM country fares. Mid-tempo hard rock licks mix with guitar slides on “Tattoos on This Town.” The title track is a straightforward modern rock song. But all of this variety is dwarfed by the album’s biggest surprise: “Dirt Road Anthem.” It starts out like all the other songs on My Kinda Party, with sentimental country crooning and copious slides. But then, the song changes tone and Aldean is rapping with a Southern drawl, before returning to its country roots. The great thing is that these two vastly different styles sound so seamless together. Hell, even when you invite Ludacris to rap on the remix, “Dirt Road Anthem” doesn’t sound like a jarring mishmash. It’s these moments that I wished My Kinda Party could have expanded upon, instead of just staying with average mid-tempo country ballads. Country pop fans will be satisfied, but this ain’t the kind of party for the rest of us.

Grade: 5/10

Review: The Veer Union: Divide the Blackened Sky (2012)

The following is an excerpt from the memoir Outside the Aggregation: My Life as a Canadian Hermit. Here, the hermit tells us the story of why he decided to leave society.

I used to be a music journalist, working for a respected magazine in the Vancouver area. One day, I was tasked to review The Veer Union’s Divide the Blackened Sky. I first looked at the promotional pictures of the band. Hey that’s funny, their lead singer Crispin Earl looks kind of like Mr. T. Then I saw who the album’s producer was: Brian Howes. A shiver crawled up my spine. OK, I thought to myself, keep an open mind. I mean, if Shinedown producer Rob Cavallo was behind the classic Dookie, then it’s possible that not everything from Howes is a piece of mainstream rock ass. I returned to my apartment, inserted the CD into my stereo and played the opener “Borderline”

“I’m tired of being told to bite my tongue / I wanna scream at the top of my lungs” Earl yelled in one of the most Kroeger-Gontier-Shaun Morgan-Brent Smith-esque voice ever. This must be a fucking joke, I thought to myself, as nu-grunge power chords pounded aimlessly away. No way are bands still earnestly making this type music in the 2010s. However, as I continued to slog through Divide the Blackened Sky, I started to realize that The Veer Union were really being earnest with their music. There was no punchline to be found on Divide the Blackened Sky, just a barren, bland, commercialized wasteland.

Another generic, faceless power ballad in “Inside Our Scars”? Fuck me. I thought Veer Union might have been onto something on “Live Another Day,” a song that starts out with a Muse-like riff. But it was only a tease, as it devolved into another Three Days Grace/Sick Puppies clone that was the standard to this album. Did I say clone? At least those two bands had some contrasts and breakdowns to shatter the turgidity. There was none of that on Divide the Blackened Sky. As the mind numbing, whiny repetitiveness continued to abuse my ears, I started to ponder my existence, wondering if there was any purpose to life. When the final plop-metal chord of “Stolen” finished, I found myself unwilling to leave my apartment, disillusioned with society as a whole.

After what could have been a couple of weeks locked in my room, my boss called, wondering why I had not showed up for work in recently.

“Uh hello?” my boss inquired.

“The world is going numb / But I will over come”

“Haha dude, that’s funny. But seriously dude, what’s happening?”

“I’m wasting away / I won’t last long / I can’t hold on / I need to turn it all around,” I groaned.

“Holy shit, you sound like Nolan’s Batman reading a 14 year old’s Livejournal entry.”

“Actually, it’s lyrics from that band you assigned me, The Veer Union. They’re from Vancouver.”

“Oh, I’m sorry for you. Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck…” the phone fell silent.

It took me a couple more weeks for me to recover, but by then, I was not the same. Divide the Blackened Side was the straw that broke the camel’s back, the thing that ultimately made me withdraw from society. When an album such as Divide the Blackened Sky is allowed be released in 2012 without any sense of irony, it’s a sign that there’s nothing more in this world worth listening to. Not even the classic punk revival of the Japandroids, the jazz fusion of Destroyer and the bleepy bloops of Grimes were enough for convince me to stay with modern civilization, let alone in Vancouver. I quickly packed up my suitcase with nothing more than a couple days worth of clothing and headed east towards the Rockies. I knew it was there where I could escape the nu-grunge scourge and find my inner peace…

Grade: 2/10

Note: this memoir actually doesn’t exist

Review: Liturgy: Renihilation (2009)

“This thing stinks to high heaven and could only have been unearthed in Brooklyn“ – About.com’s George Pacheo

“Fuck off hipster black metal imposters!” – Rate You Music’s blackmetalemperor

The black metal establishment has learned to hate Brooklyn band Liturgy. Liturgy’s rejection of corpse paint for jeans when they perform, their hipster look in their press releases and their lead singer’s pretentious manifesto on “transcendental black metal,” a manifesto which sought to redefine what black metal is, have obviously rubbed some kvlt black metal fans in wrong way. You’ll also notice that a lot of this hate is directed at Liturgy’s ideas, not their music. And it’s kind of interesting, because when you listen to the band’s 2009 debut album Renihilation, you don’t hear anything groundbreaking. Instead, you simply hear a black metal album, with occasional moments of calm.

Let’s get this out of the way for Renihilation‘s heavier songs: there are no Dimmu Borgir symphonic orchestras, weird genre mixing or prog elements, the latter of which permeated Liturgy’s latest album Aesthetica. Instead, Renihilation mainly consists of blast beats, dense messy tremolo guitars, screeching and an overwhelming sense of hopelessness. It’s conventional stuff from a band intent on subverting the black metal establishment. Admittedly, while I do enjoy the intensity, the lack of song structure and variety does make the heavier songs an endurance test. “Beyond the Magic Forest” is the only heavy song that stands out, thanks to it having a slow, quiet breakdown in the middle. But the tedium doesn’t pull down this album too much. The great thing Renihilation does is that in between the brutality, it allows you breathe. The album contains four short untitled interludes. “Untitled 1,” “Untitled 2” and “Untitled 4” all feature ambient tones playing over a solo Gregorian chant, sort of like in the style of Sunn0)). “Untitled 3” is an instrumental consisting of post-punk guitars.

I sort of wished I never I knew about Liturgy’s holier-than-thou attitude, because that fact overshadowed my listening experience with Renihilation. If I had remained ignorant, I don’t think I would have been hoping for Renihilation to be more ambitious and less tedious. Instead, I was a little disappointed Liturgy couldn’t match their music to their words. But these complaints are coming from a person outside the black metal fanbase. I’m pretty sure if black metal fans were to have a blind listen of Renihilation, they won’t think of this as hipster bullshit, they’ll just think of this as good old destructive music.

Grade: 7/10

Review: Volbeat: Beyond Hell/Above Heaven (2010)

I never reviewed a mixtape before, but Volbeat’s Beyond Hell/Above Heaven might as well be the first one I review. If it wasn’t for Michael Poulsen’s baritone, James Hetfield-like voice and the double basses being the only constants on all the tracks, I wouldn’t have known that Beyond Hell/Above Heaven was the work of only one band. While I realize bands such as Opeth regularly branch their sounds into some surprising territory, at least you know it’s still Opeth playing. For Volbeat, one moment, they’re a heavier version of Lynyrd Skynyrd or Johnny Cash. Then suddenly they sound like Metallica before surprising us again by copying The Strokes.

Just to sample: “The Mirror and Ripper” opens the album with a combination of country rock and blast beats. But then the next track, “Heaven or Hell,” switches the album’s sound to that of 80s hard-rock. Suddenly “Who They Are” opens with Metallica riffs, before giving way to the album’s weakest track, the pop-grunge “Fallen.”

Thought that sounded really disjointed? It gets even better. “Evelyn,” which features Napalm Death’s Barney Greenway on growls, shows Volbeat dabbling with death metal. “16 Dollars” resembles a twangy, more hyperactive version of Aerosmith’s “Walk this Way.” “A Warrior’s Call” sounds like a WWE entrance theme song, with lead singer Michael Poulsen screaming “let’s get ready to rumble!” as band members yell “fight!” “7 Shots” starts with slide guitars playing over double bass drums before Muse-like prog metal chords come in, while “A New Day” starts with distorted post-punk guitars. The song currently (as in June 14, 2012) charting on the Billboard rock chart, “Still Counting,” jumps between an unpleasant ska verse and a Slayerrific thrash section. Volbeat closes everything out with the anthemic pop-punk track “Thanks,” where Poulsen, in a token of appreciation to the fans, sings “We thank you people for being around/Supporting Volbeat with love and hell fire.”

As you can tell, I found this lack of focus a little frustrating. But it was not because Volbeat sounded desperate and confused. Quite the opposite in fact. Except for “Fallen” and “Still Counting,” every song is simply solid. The pop-punk songs emit pure energetic warmth. The country elements meld surprisingly well with the extreme metal stuff. Volbeat doesn’t allow Greenway’s growls to take over “Evelyn,” as the band helps contrasts Greenway’s contributions with Poulsen’s soaring voice. In turn, as I listened to each song, I found myself wishing they could have built off the sound of the song I was currently listening to. Country and metal? I wouldn’t mind a whole album of that. Death metal mixed with operatic elements? Awesome. But with these elements chopped up and strewn all over the album, Beyond Hell/Above Heaven felt like of mashup of incomplete, but promising, albums, instead of a fully fleshed out one.

Grade: 7/10

Review: Thousand Foot Krutch: The End Is Where We Begin (2012)

Hey teenagers with inferiority complexes or overly nostalgic millennials born in 1985, do you miss the obnoxiousness of the Family Value Tour or the hell that was Woodstock 99? Well, prepare to whip out your pain relievers as Thousand Foot Krutch’s The End Is Where We Begin is here to resurrect those boneheaded experiences for the 2010s. TFK may be a CCM band that never uses any offensive words, and this album might be independently released, but don’t worry about hearing anything fresh or exciting, because TFK doesn’t fuck around with innovation here. As leader singer Trevor McNevan sings on “We Are:” “too much thinking is bad for my health.” That’s right McNevan, bands need to keep everything simple and generic, just like cover to The End Is Where We Begin. Fuck experimentation, let’s rawk!

Don’t let the choruses and vocoders in the opener “The Introduction” fool you into believing The End Is Where We Begin in anyway challenging, because once it ends, it becomes easily digestible for your adolescent tastes. You got your Three Days Grace tributes, groany voice and all, in “We Are” and the title track. Maybe you want something other than Drowning Pools’ “Bodies” to transform you Youtube videos into endurance tests. Well, you have the boisterous “Down” to accompany your epic MW3 frag video. Sad that Breaking Benjamin can’t traumatize radio anymore? Then the intro to “I Get Wicked,” which sounds like BB’s “The Diary of Jane,” can hold you through. Perhaps you pine for more whiny, nu-grunge pop songs to fill your heart with sorrow. Well, you can listen to the Linkin Park knockoffs “Be Somebody” and “War of Change” to quell your heartbroken feeling. “Wait, it’s just about to break, its more than I can take,” screams McNevan in his best Chester Bennington impression on “War of Change.” Quit it TFK, you’re going to make me cry!

But TFK doesn’t sulk it’s way through The End Is Where We Begin. They know there needs to be some variety as well. First, TFK knows that an album needs heart. That’s where the cheeseball acoustic tracks “All I Need to Know” and “So Far Gone” come in to jarringly transition you from the nu-grunge moaning. For a fist in the air track to appeal to self-righteous teens, TFK has “Light Up The Sky,” a soundalike of Rage Against the Machine’s “Guerrilla Radio.” Now you can turn this shit up (in all seriousness, “Light Up The Sky” is easily the best track on this album)! To show people that TFK realizes it’s 2012, they use autotune on “Courtesy Call.” See, isn’t TFK well rounded and hip?

I never knew an independent release that doesn’t cuss or degrade women could still sound like it came from the same corporate rock teat that bred Korn runoffs such as Puddle of Mudd, but Thousand Foot Krutch proved me wrong. The End Is Where We Begin is so solid, not even a thousand foot crutch can prevent this album from crashing and burning into a pit of mediocrity.

Grade: 4/10

Review: Tony Parker: TP (2007)

Tomorrow marks the beginning of the 2012 NBA Finals between the Miami Heat and the OKC Thunder. At the end of that series, not only will one team be hoisting the Larry O’ Brien Championship Trophy, one individual will also be hoisting the Bill Russell NBA Finals MVP award. Out of the 27 players that have received the MVP award, at least two* of them have also released rap albums.

Wait, two? Yeah, Shaq wasn’t the only NBA Finals MVP to record a rap album. San Antonio’s Tony Parker did so as well. Titled TP (insert toilet paper joke here), Parker’s album was released in 2007, the same year he won that MVP award. It’s in French, so it will be hard for me to point out any glaringly bad (or good) lyrics Parker doles out. Instead, I’ll be reviewing TP like how people review a foreign language artist such as Sigur Ros: sonically. I can say that while TP is not as awful as you think, it’s an album we heard so many times before. Mix in some crunk and lift from Akon or Chris Brown on the R&B track and you have this album. The only selling point for TP is the fact that it’s Tony Parker’s rap album. Remove Parker and TP would another typical party-rap release to be relegated as background music for nightclubs.

Being how Shaq’s rap songs were notorious for their unintentionally hilarious verses, you might wonder whether or not Parker’s songs are as equally disastrous. You might get a chuckle with the album’s bombastic intro informing you of Parker’s greatness on the court, or Jamie Foxx’s lack of grasp of the French language on “L’effet Papillon.” “Bienvenue dans le Texas” could also elicit some laughter thanks to its desperate attempt to portray Parker as a badass from the “dirty dirty south.” But beyond those moments of unintentional comedy, TP is a pretty serious album. Parker raps really well, his rhymes and verses flowing out very smoothly. He can display a variety of emotions, be it understanding and subtle on “Generation motivee,” agitated and combative on “Les clefs de la reussite” or cocky on “Gametime.” The album also contains really slick, high quality production.

The album’s seriousness is actually a little problematic because unlike Shaq, we can’t enjoy TP ironically; we have to listen to it straightforwardly. And when you do that, TP isn’t impressive. While “Balance toi” has a menacing Daft-Punk influenced chorus, most of the other beats I found on here weren’t particularly original or gripping. Guest contributions, usually sung in English, are mostly saccharine (for example, “Premier Love” proclaims “Today I could do for you/I could die for you/Baby you’re my first love”). The only guest appearance that contributes anything is Jamie Foxx’s crooning on “L’effet Papillon,” where Foxx boast lines such as “All the haters that want to fuss can’t fuck with us” in a calming R&B chorus. “Premier Love,” “La famille” and “Generation motivee” are average MOR R&B tracks.

For those hoping for me to go further in my criticism, sorry for the lack of schandenfreude. TP is definitely not the worst thing I ever heard. He can sound cocky, but it’s not as nauseous as Soulja Boy. The beats, while unoriginal, still do their job in being catchy, and Tony Parker can pass off as a legitimate musician. Maybe if I knew French, perhaps I could dig up some Kevin Federline-like moments on here, but as an English speaker, I can’t bring myself to completely trash TP. Yes, Tony Parker is obviously better off sticking to basketball, but TP is not toilet paper.

Grade: 5/10

*Apparently Kobe Bryant also has a rap album, but I found almost no information on that release

Review: Finger Eleven: Life Turns Electric (2010)

How does Finger Eleven follow up a massive hit like “Paralyzer”? Why, by filtering out a lot of the danger that made Them vs. You vs. Me, the album “Paralyzer” came from, somewhat more compelling than most modern rock albums. Instead, for the band’s followup album Life Turns Electric, we get a mostly generic, boring post-grunge release. It’s Finger Eleven sacrificing their uniqueness for the recognition of not just being a one-hit wonder, a band strangling themselves in hopes that their pandering could resurrect their commercial magic.

Life Turns Electric actually begins and ends solidly. “Any Moment Now” opens the album with a potent Wolfmother influenced guitar lick, while “Love’s What You Left Me With” closes the album on a low key, intimate ballad. I also found “Stone Soul” to be a catchy, lively pop-rock tune. Beyond those three tracks, however, lies a vast chasm of blandness. In order to appeal the rock audiences, Finger Eleven channels many of the popular (and awful) trends in mainstream rock. “Whatever Doesn’t Kill Me” recalls Papa Roach’s atrocious “Scars” thanks to Scott Anderson’s overly whiny vocals. Finger Eleven tries to sound badass with the obnoxious “Pieces Fit” and “Good Intentions.” “Living in a Dream” is Life Turns Electric’s attempt at recapturing “Paralyzer”‘s commercial jackpot, a funky dance track that resembles a more overwrought version of the band’s biggest hit. “Ordinary Life” is a rather ordinary country rock ditty. Breaking Benjamin and Three Days Grace are popular? Well, why not lift their painfully grating post-grunge/nu-metal vocals for “Don’t Look Down.”

Listening to this album two years after its release, it’s sad to realize that all these attempts to climb back into relevancy have failed, as no single from Life Turns Electric came even close to matching “Paralyzer”‘s success. Instead, Finger Eleven produced an album that’s neither lively nor electric.

Grade: 4/10

Review: 12 Rods: Gay? (1996)

Anyone who reads music reviews knows that getting a grade of 10.0 from Pitchfork Media is a huge deal. If those pretentious tastemakers give you a perfect score, it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks, you guys are suddenly the center of the hipster universe. Usually.

Pitchfork Media also has a history deleting reviews. Thus was the fate that befell the Minneapolis band 12 Rods and their EP Gay?. The EP received that coveted grade in 1996, back when Pitchfork Media was still in its infancy and based in Minnesota. Then, in 2008, Pitchfork deleted the review, probably embarrassed that the EP got a higher grade than Funeral or Illinois (you can still read the review here). To make matters worst for the band, 12 Rods got completely eviscerated from Pitchfork Media. All Pitchfork has on 12 Rods these days are two album reviews. There’s not even a casual mention of them being from Minnesota.

With such a evisceration, it sounds like Gay? might actually be a shitty EP. However,  after listening to Gay?, I can say that like Fuck, it’s unfortunate that 12 Rods had to compete against 90s indie giants such as Pavement or My Bloody Valentine for attention (if only Youtube or WordPress existed back then). While the EP does not warrant the 10.0 rating, Gay?, and 12 Rods, still deserve recognition. Being released in 1996, you can look at the EP as an artifact of the time period between the end of the classic shoegaze period and the beginning of the current nu-gaze movement. But you should really look at the EP as an excellently charming, astral work, a mix of MBV’s sprawling shoegaze with a pop-rock attitude. The songs are long and extravagant, but 12 Rods puts in a lot warmth to prevent it from becoming turgid.

“Red” opens the EP with crunchy, Smashing Pumpkins guitars before giving way to a mix of sublime synth chords and dreamy guitars, creating a dangerous, yet welcoming, masterpiece. “Mexico” features Duran Duran dance beats beneath a calming fuzz. “Gaymo” is a slow, beautiful country love ballad topped off by a soaring, majestic guitar solo. “Revolute” ends the EP on a 9 minute long prog track, an epic that’s invigorating the first half, then pristine, then blistering, and then pristine again at the end.

Again, not everything is perfect. The big problem is that despite having only 6 songs, Gay? has a running time of over 38 minutes, which makes the EP drag a little. “Friend” and “Make Out Music” are the EP’s weak points, with both tracks coming off as lethargic mid-tempo mush when compared to the rest of the EP. Still, don’t ignore Gay? all because Pitchfork suddenly thought it was uncool to give this release a perfect score. It’s an overlooked, gay (as in happy) gem worth your time.

Grade: 8/10

Review: I See Stars: Digital Renegade (2012)

Remember crabcore, with its hilariously overblown guitar playing stance and its odd mix of extreme metal with dance music? I See Stars is one of those types bands. As you can imagine from mixing insanely different types of music together, their 2012 album Digital Renegade is even more scatteredbrained than a kid with ADD. It just can’t decide whether it wants to be a catchy emo-pop, a brutal metalcore or a danceable electronic album. Instead, we get a mix of all three elements, which in turn makes Digital Renegade an unfocused mishmash of half-baked ideas.

The problems start immediately. “Gnars Attack” opens the album with soundtrack worthy strings and it teases that it will be a destructive symphonic metalcore track. But then, whiny emo vocals, and eventually cheesy synth beats and autotuned vocals, ruin the heavy atmosphere. “Summer in Connersville” begins with something that you might hear from Yellowcard. But just as you’re either being enchanted or horrified by the emo-pop, heavy power chords and growls overwhelm everything before giving way to Daft Punk. These jarring transitions just continue for the album’s duration, making extremely difficult to fully soak in one sound or another.

Because I See Stars is so intent on trying to sound both catchy and brutal, all of these musical ideas come off as half-baked. Only “IBelieve” works on Digital Renegade because it wisely sticks to one sound (in this case, electropop). Of the three genres they mix, I really wished I See Stars could have just stuck with metalcore. Digital Renegade has the opposite problem of Breathe Carolina: it’s the electronica that is dragging down the rock elements. Their death growls, blast beats and heavy metal chords are legitimately terrifying. But it’s hard to feel the intensity when it is sharing space with teen angst and club beats.

I enjoy experimentation, but this is the wrong kind. Death growls are cool, autotune can be artsy and emo vocals, well someone likes them, but mixing them together is akin to allowing Cannibal Corpse, T-Pain and Jimmy Eat World to DJ a nightclub together. Maybe I See Stars were trying to be renegades by differentiating themselves from someone like Underoath or As I Lay Dying. In Digital Renegade however, all I saw was a mess.

Grade: 4/10