The Blackout + Silverstein + hollywood undead @ Wolverhampton Wulfrun Hall – 22nd May 2009
I arrive too late to catch the American bands Silverstein and The Hollywood Undead, although I did catch a little of each at the Slam Dunk festival two days later.
The Hollywood Undead play an atrocious mix of rock and rap, taking the same ingredients as the seminal Rage Against The Machine, but instead of producing impressive riffs, powerful lyrics and a legendary backwash, The Undead use awful sampled beats and their hordes of rappers destroy lyrics with the charisma of the average goat. Childish games and bad masks do little to warm anyone over the age of 12 to this band, so if you fancy something more mature than a poor man’s Linkin Park, I’d look elsewhere.
Silverstein on record are a great band, while they may well be pretty generic these days, they were at the forefront of the original ’emo’ music. However when it comes to their live show there’s a lot lacking. The guitars are sloppy, and the vocalist is appalling, so much so that classic tracks are totally unrecognizable. It seems impossible that a band as big as this could be so bad live, and it really is a shame. The vocals are what let them down the most, although the crowd didn’t seem to mind at all, singing the words back better the singer could.
The Blackout are getting very big, for a band that sounds very much like so many others out there, there must be something about them. I can’t pin it down myself. Their dual vocalists don’t wow with intertwining melodies, nor do they even sing in harmony at any point – to the point that it seems silly to have two. The guitar work is also lacking in anything special, formulaic riffs and simplistic chord progressions don’t really add much to the sound. However, the chants all seem to go down very well – simple repeated words clearly do it for this band’s key demographic. Although the key demographic for The Blackout seems to be girls, mostly about 16 years old. The band play well, and the audience loves them, but the generic sound does not thrill the more cynical in the audience.
Review – Terra Duff
Photos – Adam Spall