Stars Are Falling | Skylines
Blood & Ink Split Series: Volume One
5.4
Uh oh. It’s a split CD. The ultimate display of underground unity, or record label greed, is often a mixed bag. On the one hand, you can get some killer stuff, like Exhumed/Gadget or County Medical Examiners/General Surgery. On the other hand, you can end up with something like what Blood and Ink have delivered with this one.
Stars Are Falling are up first, and they deliver us four tracks of faceless emo-core. Every now and then a riff jumps out and grabs your attention, but like other bands of the ilk, it fades away once the clean guitar parts or vocals kick in. The vocalist has a heck of a growl, but the band can’t back it up. They’re competent enough, but the music cries out for a thick wall of sound effect, and they’re delivering it a bit thin. I've gotta say I'm not looking forward to the second half of this one.
Wow, I can’t believe someone put these two bands together. You’d never see a Slayer/Sum 41 split CD. Yet, Skylines are everything that SAF are not, with a thicker sound that comfortably supports their screaming maniac of a vocalist, which makes for a much more aggressive package. Unfortunately they too throw in those annoying clean vocal moments, but at least they aren’t quite as bad. Pretty damn solid throughout their four tracks, although I could have done without the instrumental. My only complaint is that they sound an awful lot like most hardcore band's breakdown sections stretched out into full-length songs. But hey, at least I can listen to them without wanting to jam a pencil in my ear.
The best advice I can give is to either download the Skylines half of this split, or steal it off of some white belt-wearing emo kid and make a copy. They’re worth listening to and owning, but no one should be forced to own something as tepid as Stars Are Falling, especially when so many bands do the exact same thing, only better.
