Review: The Tokyo Smash “The Scene Queen Reigns Supreme” CD

Ehhh, I'm not that into this. Former members of As I Lay Dying, Thirty Called Arson, The Agony Scene, and a few others playing semi poppy and melodic emo with sarcastically "humorous" song titles and little hints of metal, but this is far more straightforward and upbeat than anything the aforementioned bands ever dropped. The music is alright, there are some solidly energetic tempos and layers of melodic chord progressions, but the vocals are weak as hell. The background singing is flat and lifeless, the screaming is ineffective and doesn't meet up with the catchiness of the music at all, etc. They really need to use singing vocals as the dominant style, but they need a singer that has a much more forceful delivery, and vocal harmonies would of course be mandatory. It's a shame, because there is some killer music on this EP but the more I listen to it the more I dislike the vocals. The screaming is actually not awful, but it does not make sense with this music, and the singing is awful, so... what can you do? "So Yeah I'm Getting Spinners on My Escalade" is one of the more effectively written songs as the screaming vocals somehow manage to arrange themselves more effectively against the music, though the one metallic break of chugging chords and dual guitar runs is an annoying hitch; and "The Drive Home From Joplin" contrasts some of the harder and darker distorted guitar work with some nice clean guitars and piano for the most effective track herein by far; but beyond that I'm really only taken by some of the faster and more memorable passages in "Crush's Got Gas Money Too" and such. The production's pretty good. It needs a little more punch as far as overall brightness/low-end goes, and the vocals are thinner than the instruments, but other than that the mix is really strong and the tones are decent. The guitars are clear and the distortion works great with both the chunkier rhythms and the lighter riffing, the bass is audible, the drums sound okay, etc. Cleaning it up to add more low-end punch and an extra edge of clarity would make the music sound dead on, definitely. And the layout does indeed look absolutely awesome here, I must give 'em credit for that. The outer cover is full color and looks vibrant, while the insane pages use a lot of high contrast artwork and minimal color schemes with lots of red and pink. The text all looks killer as well, be it tightly arranged fonts or handwritten track titles. It's all surprisingly detailed for the brevity of the EP. Now, I'm not really into the lyrics, it's all your usual personal turmoil stuff with "witty" song titles and that kind of thing, I've seen far worse, but the lyrics are pretty tame compared to how creative the design is. This is certainly a 50/50 release, because a better vocalist would make an immense difference, and beyond that all they'd really need to do would be to streamline the writing by tossing the unnecessary metal riffs. They'd still be rather typical, and there would still be room for growth... but this EP leaves something to be desired, so... despite a few good songs it's not winning me over.