Scream Apologies
As Life Withers Away
4.4
I know that sometimes vanity gets in the way of objectivity, but I have to imagine that a band like Scream Apologies are aware of their mediocrity. This release is generic, boring, cliched, and basically pretty damn passé. In fact, I found this excruciatingly dull EP something of an ordeal to listen to. I do vocals for a joke metalcore band and we’re on about the same level as this stuff. I would almost rather listen to an outright bad release than a painfully average one such as this. The band has decent technical abilities and decent songwriting skills as well. The thing is, in probably the most over saturated subgenre of heavy music, there is no way that this is going to be heard.
The utterly predictable clean vocals on the second track set the tone for the rest of the release. In a word, insipid. I didn’t bother to check out the lyrics, but what I could discern made me cringe a bit. Yelling “and you will fucking pay” during a breakdown tends not to have the impact that a band might imagine that it would have. That’s a pretty fair analogy for the whole album; I’m sure that the guys in the band think they’re coming up with pretty cool stuff, but to an outside observer, it’s nothing worth writing home about.
It's cool when people get together and make music, no matter how poor the quality the end result may be. I don’t want to discourage a band like Scream Apologies from doing what sounds good to them, and I also dislike music journalists who completely rail on amateur bands, but I think that a bit of discretion is needed in many cases. This sounds just like any number of local bands that I know. When their members play me songs that they’ve come up with, I’ll reply with an insincere “sounds pretty cool” and change the subject. Most of those bands would know not to send their shoddy output to a major online publication. Ignore this release.
