I don’t want to say that this record is the very last piece of shit under a street punk’s dog’s paw. No, that would be stagy and not true, either. This is really a decent piece of rock music and that is exactly the problem! Boysetsfire used to be a band that had a meaning, whose record “the day the sun went out” was kind of genre defining and that was a blast on stage. I’ve seen them on their last tour and it was nothing but a sad, sad mainstream rock show. Sure, singer Nathan has one of the most beautiful pairs of eyes ever put into a human’s head but that simply isn’t enough at least not for me…

To characterize this record one would have to invent the term Middle of the Road hardcore. This is the hardcore equivalent to the Bee Gees or Simply Red. Okay, that is a bit hard because Boysetsfire are still miles better than let’s say Killswitch Engage or Atreyu (except their brilliant Bon Jovi cover…) but it comes close to the truth. Maybe they are Roxette or something…

All right, the intro is a fine piece of pathos, song two “requiem” will surely be the emocore disco dancefloor smasher that it was written to be and song four “the misery index” is even twice as pathetic as the intro and will make hordes of teenagers cry and dye their hair black period. But does this have anything to do with modern hardcore? Okay, it might have in terms of being outdated in our postmodern times but this doesn’t seem to be what the writer in whatever magazine wanted to say. She/he wanted to express that this was some sort of enhancement of the good old hardcore thing but in fact it is quite the opposite. This is everything that Black Flag or Bad Brains shouted against. This is plain rock pop. This is so polished. This will never hurt anyone and it will only move those who don’t know that there are such things like The Smiths or the late Johnny Cash. This is music for very young people who want very big feelings. What they get is Hollywood. Let’s hope they will find Lars von Trier one day…  [jan]

www.boysetsfire.com