Scary Kids Scaring Kids - The City Sleeps in Flames

Genre rock Publisher Immortal Records External Links Official Website Immortal Records

It's almost painful to look at the cover of The City Sleeps in Flames, the first LP by Phoenix goth-metal-punk-something-or-other riff-mongers Scary Kids Scaring Kids. Washed out in Matrixy green, a man and a woman dressed in white stand on a precipice overlooking an industrial wasteland cast in silhouette by a cloud-obscured sun. The cliché tells us not to judge a book by its cover, but record sleeves are all too telling. In both form and content the cover sends up a signal flare, and what you see is what you get: slick with shouted emo-tion, deliberately crafted, predictable in its rancor, The City Sleeps in Flames sentimentalizes the Apocalypse (which is as impending now as it was in the heyday of tent revivals, don't you know) over guitars crisp and crunchy as astronaut ice cream.

City is a prime example of a record (possibly a band?) not adding up to the sum of its parts. I'll lay it on the line right now: I'm a shredder at heart. Hard, loud, crunchy, and impossibly fast - that's how I like my guitars. Harmonizer pedal? Yes, please. It stands to reason, then, with it's combination of rhythmically intricate metalhead-at-guitar-shop wankery, and its incorporation of classic rock and roll imagery (Revelations could serve as the liner notes for Slayer's Reign in Blood avant la lettre, no doubt), the record would be a sure bet. Not so, apparently.

(A big) part of the problem is vocalist Tyson Stevens. Stevens deals in whiny vocal platitudes and neutered screams, and this currency has become the gold standard in mainstream goth, if you want to call it that (see My Chemical Romance for a shining example). He rants about some catastrophe, which is either recent or impending, depending on the song. "You'll be lucky if you make it out alive," he tells us on "The World as We Know It," but what we'd be lucky to make it out of is entirely unclear. An election gone horribly wrong? The World Trade Center? Sodom? Gomorrah? This topsy-turvy, modern world of ours? Give me a clue so I'll know how much canned tuna and ammo to buy.

While Stevens screams in vain about some bad things happening, the band grinds on beneath him. Everything is all fast and loud and metally. Which is fine, but Stevens seems to kick off some kind of domino effect because, for all of the band's technical proficiency, every riff, lick, and keyboard buzz is subordinated to the banalities of the vocal line. Guitarists DJ Wilson and Steve Kirby lock in like atomic clockwork, but they're just spinning their atomic cogs - no escapement, no pallet, no traction. Again I'm reminded of the record's cover: a static scene, no motion, not even the implication of action, just two anonymous figures staring out over the same ravaged valley forever. Likewise the landscape of the record changes very little, modulating between sophomoric pity-thrash about loneliness ("Empty Glasses" and "The Only Medicine"), vague devastation (title track and "The World as We Know It"), and "A Breath of Sunshine," the obligatory, album-closing ballad meant to exhibit the Scary Kids Scaring Kids's range and depth. Unfortunately, all it proves is that they sometimes get as tired of their sound as I do.