The Blackout - The Best in Town [review]

a.k.a Welsh....metal?! Heresy!

Hi, it's me again. I know, you've all missed me (both of you, that is), but never fear! I have returned, with another slightly jaded review. Slightly. Anyway, the monstrosity that has been bashing holes in my eardrums for the past hour is certainly...eh...spectacular. The artist? The Blackout (a few of you may know them for their...er....backing screaming on a lostprophets album). The album? The Best in Town. Hell yes, they're modest ;)

Basically, this is, as a whole, a fairly boring album, which means, unfortunately, this review will be BO-O-O-ORING (I have no idea how to pronounce that....). Right. With that out of the way, I'll take a look at the album itself (a novel idea, for sure)


^Album art seems to have a glowing green Jesus standing on a hill for no reason whatsoever. Wonderful.

Well, it starts amazingly, with the 'cleverly' named STFUppercut. A punchy intro riff, screamed vocals gelling perfectly with normal ones to create musical awesomeness.
Yeh, anyway, incredible song...moving on....

Unfortunately, it seems that Sean Smith (the blond one with the cool hair) et al. weren't entirely sure where to go from there. 'Save Our Selves' is slightly less good then it should be. Still a good song, but I was expecting more. Shame. Worse still, 'Top of the World' is whiny, cheesy emo crap. Like, really whiny. there's nothing to distinguish it from 10,000,000 other songs sung by lots-of-eyeliner-wearing, wrist-cutting sad people.

Next up on this spinning disc of Welsh fun is 'The Fire'. I love this song. Lots. It makes me happy. But this album already has STFUppercut. Did we really need another screamy song? Children of the Night, too is pretty good. It reminds me somewhat of 'Save Ourselves', but its substantially better, for some reason. Damn, its boring when I have no complaints, isn't it? :P

Malheuresment (yeh, that's French), the band lapses into REALLY CRAP MUSIC for a long section of this album. You know, just for fun. 'Said & Done' was awful. 'Silent' made me wish made my CD player was indeed silent. 'I Love myself and I Wanna Live' wasn't very good either. By 'This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things' I was seriously considering burning the CD over a nice warm bonfire of the corpses of the band's members (yes, I am violent and disturbed. We all are. Blame society.) Respect for trying to be all grown up, but that's not why we buy screamo albums. The grand finale of TBIT didn't impress either. 'We're going to Hell, so Bring the Sunblock', despite having an awesome name, was pretty meh. Average, even. Screaming. More screaming. Bad lyrics.

So, we can safely conclude that this album is, while not complete and utter crap, is far from good. The Blackout are certainly evolving though, and I look forward to future albums from them :D

Hmm...this blog hasn't had much luck with music thus far, has it? :( If you have any suggestions of albums/films/pretty much anything for me to review, drop me a line in the comments section below :)

C+