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)

Live review: The Blackout/Silverstein/Hollywood Undead/The Urgency (Newcastle University, 27/05/09)

The musical Zeitgeist has a tendency to look down its nose at the nation’s youth. It’s a horrible sort of ageism, based on the archaic notion that just because they don’t have many years behind them, children cannot ‘appreciate’ music. Obviously, this is complete nonsense: it’s their passion that turns gigs such as tonight’s Blackout show into thrill rides of epic proportions.

While openers The Urgency offer a more refined live experience, mixing keyboard parts with choppy guitars in a sort of indie/emo crossover, the crowd still manages to get jumping. Hollywood Undead, meanwhile, are welcomed with a standing ovation, although it’s difficult to understand why. This is comic rap metal; the band members clearly don’t take themselves too seriously, jumping around onstage in Slipknot-esque masks, but the joke just isn’t funny. They resort to machismo and misogyny (‘Everywhere I Go’), profanity and homophobia (‘Undead’) in a cheap attempt to get laughs and it reeks of desperation. The masses may love them but Hollywood Undead are little more than a poor man’s Bloodhound Gang, and that really isn’t saying much.

All is forgiven, however, when Silverstein drag their carcasses onstage and proceed to tear through an all-too-brief but outlandishly shambolic set that takes in much from new album ‘A Shipwreck in the Sand’ and a few classics to boot. Shane stumbles around the stage, looking like he’s just been plucked out of the moshpit, while guitarists Neil and Josh flank him, casually indulging in the kind of extravagant riffery that sets the room alight. The pits are immense, the flow of crowdsurfers constant and the number of messed up, sweat-drenched faces uncountable. If there’s one area in which the band are lacking though, it’s their between-song banter, as Shane’s quip about Ice T falls very flat, the majority of the audience being too young to know who he is.

Thankfully, The Blackout have no such problems, as their cheap pops stick to the here and now. They praise the recently relegated Newcastle United, declare Gazza their favourite Geordie, and even when they launch into a pointless tirade about ‘shitty indie music’ and ‘those who waste their lives taking drugs’ (Pete Doherty, The Blackout are looking at you), the cheers are still loud enough to blow the roof off. The kids are in awe of these picture perfect Welshmen, and the band take every opportunity to exploit their devotion. The sex appeal is almost outlandish: singer Sean Smith pouts, preens and performs fellatio on his microphone, while his too-tight YS T-shirt rides up and exposes his midriff, making the girls, and the boys, wet with glee.

At times, the music threatens to play second fiddle to this excessive posturing, but they have enough tricks up their sleeves to carry it off. The performance itself is a bit of a clusterfuck, with singers bouncing off drum kits and microphones swinging around violently. The band infuse everything with over-the-top bluster, which works just as well for the slower songs (‘Top of the World’) as the angrier moments (‘Shut the Fuck Uppercut’). During ‘Save Our Selves’, Sean even gets everyone to sit on the floor and once the guitars kick in, jump in the air and “smash the room up.” He doesn’t really mean it, of course: it’s all part of the playful hyperbole of youth, the sort of thing that makes the adolescent experience so exciting.

This is music by the kids, for the kids, and if some of us have become too old to appreciate the genius of that, then maybe it’s about time we got the hell out of the moshpit. (7/10)