Reviews

I love guessing games.  I love judging books by their covers and being proven wrong.  I enjoy prejudice in general.  Not against race or gender, but in the arts, of course.  When I see a band photo of some middle-class, white teenagers with a misspelled band name that is the misspelled term for a battlefield priest, I figure Christian-Screamo.
 
Well, am I right, or am I wrong?  I won’t lie to you, dear reader.  I’m a grizzled old bastard.  I am dirty, jaded, and arrogant.  I don’t even know what “screamo” is, let alone “emo.”  I think I do, and I’m going to assume I’m right.
 
I’m going to call Chaplan “boyfriend and girlfriend music.”  When I hear these songs I feel like I do sometimes when I wander into the wrong show:  everyone is half my age and the cute punk rock couples are holding hands and listening to an equally young and cute band on stage.  The band is usually shite.  But Chaplan aren’t shite.  I hear a young band that is really energetic and really trying (desperately) to write catchy songs that are both melodic and heavy.  By the third song in on this album, I lapsed into memories of making out with my high school girlfriend while watching Friday the 13th and stealing swigs out of her father’s imported vodka.  That’s what Chaplan are:  thinking they are threatening and dangerous, but in reality just doing what kids do.  It’s a phase, and these guys sound talented enough that they might actually go someplace when they’ve got a few more years behind them.
 
To close, and to answer my original question if I correctly judged a book by its cover, I’ll quote Oscar Wilde:  “All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling.”