posted 03/17/2006 (Fri) @ 10:17 am
>>> Music Reviews
Boys Night Out - Trainwreck (2005)
More of a Planecrash
- Introducing
- Dreaming
- Waking
- Sentencing
- Medicating
- Purging
- Relapsing
- Recovering
- Composing
- Disintegrating
- Healing
- Dying
Sugar, we’re goin’ down. “Trainwreck” is a concept album that plays more like a plane crash than its title would suggest, which is to say it takes a spectacular nosedive in quality after the first couple high-flying tracks.
An idea for a record like “Trainwreck” sounds promising on paper: the disoriented jumble of events surrounding a mental patient’s unintentional murder of the one he loves most, and exploration of the ensuing tragedy leaves a grand canyon sized hole full of pain and anguish for the Boys’ guitars (and, these days, singer) to not-so-gently weep about.
Unfortunately, in portraying the obfuscated story of “The Patient,” Boys Night Out hit the wrong chord a few too many times for taste, which at some point stops being purposeful and starts sounding spiritless, repetitious and uninspired. The songs undergo a downward spiral of their own and deteriorate from the genuinely anthemic quality of “Dreaming” into considerably more prosaic emo/hardcore chunk ballads.
It’s not that Boys Night Out don’t possess the ability to shift gears — this much is apparent from the dichotomy witnessed between the styles of “Dreaming” and “Waking” — it’s that after awhile, they just seem to forget about trying at all. Maybe it’s an unfortunate side effect of trying to cram too much story into too small an album, but most of the music on “Trainwreck” is going to sound awful damn familiar to anyone who hasn’t been living under a rock since MTV heard about bands like Brand New and Fall Out Boy.
The stilted “Introduction” adds nothing musically, and “lyrically” (”These people were in LOVE! DEEPLY IN LOVE!“)? Only a long-winded and heavy-handed prologue to inform and educate lazier listeners; it could easily be cut, and gets the skip every time. If anything, the expository press kit monologue could be replaced with the stripped-down instrumental noodling underneath, and nothing else, for a much nicer lead-in.
Don’t even get me started on the forehead-smacking melodrama that is “Dying.” Someone call “The Doctor” a script doctor ASAP, because this is some of the sappiest stuff you’ll find outside of IHOP’s kitchen. The music is a sight better, but the spoken word monologues give it a good punch in the gut to finish the record off.
For anyone with “rings around their wrist proving that they exist” who seeks a rewarding listening experience, I recommend pairing “Trainwreck” with Armor for Sleep’s “What To Do When You’re Dead,” another lackluster record that will never escape the looming shadow of that terrible and misrepresenting label that is “emo.”
Tags: emo, hard rock, hardcore, metalcore, punk, screamo
