Album review: Hollywood Undead: 'Swan Songs'

HOLLYWOOD UNDEAD: 'Swan Songs' (Polydor)

Okay, first things first. Hollywood Undead most definitely place their tongues firmly in their collective cheeks. This is irony, ladies and gentlemen; we aren’t supposed to take its shockingly misogynistic and homophobic machismo seriously. The ‘band’ clearly aspire to be six Eminems for the 21st century, rapping about ‘pop[ping] more pussy than Ashton Kutcher’ and taking brass knuckles to all the ‘faggots who hate.’ Hell, they’ve even dubbed their début album ‘Swan Songs’, as if goading every critic from here to the Antipodes into making ‘witty’ quips about how, if there’s any justice in the world, the prophecy will be self-fulfilling.

The problem is, for all this may be a gigantic glob of pre-pubescent sarcasm, the joke just isn’t funny. It’s a tired, one-trick pony that loses any semblance of worth within the first twenty seconds of truly atrocious album opener ‘Undead’, and then proceeds to repeat itself over and over again, ad fucking nauseum, for forty utterly diabolical, excruciatingly painful minutes. Listening to ‘Swan Songs’ all the way through is the equivalent of taking a pneumatic drill to your earlobes, but increasing the size of the drill bit with every passing second. Each track is driven by a mind-numbing trudge of a beat, worked over a set of pointless screams and irritatingly whiny vocals. Oh, and there’s the obligatory helping of aggressive ‘rapping’, included so as to ensure that things stay sufficiently masculine and don’t become, perish the thought, too ‘faggy.’

And whether or not this seemingly bigoted streak is truly a reflection of their attitudes is largely irrelevant. The notion that we’re supposed to laugh at lines like ‘Come on girls, I wanna see you drinking/I wanna see your brain start shrinking…/Drunken pussy’s what I’m thinking’ and ‘From these industry fucks to these faggot ass punks/You don’t know what it takes to get this mother fucking junk’ betrays their transparency. The lyrics read as the pathetic shock tactics that they are, adopted in an effort to give a mediocre band the ‘edge’ that they so desperately need. It’s telling that the first statement that the band make on the album is that they ‘don’t give a fuck what [we] think or say’, and then devote about three quarters of the rest of the thing to telling their ‘haters’ where they can shove it, instructing us to ‘slit [our] wrists, get pissed and go jump off a bridge’ and whining about how they ‘almost died for this music.’ Really? Well, it sure as hell wasn’t worth it, mate.

Of course, Hollywood Undead would probably tell us that they’re being sarcastic here too, that we should take the words with a pinch of salt. But there’s only so much irony we’ll accept, only so many excuses for utterly meritless music that we’ll take before we just call a spade a spade and throw the damn CD in the nearest fiery furnace. Absolutely, unequivocally, awful. (0/10)