Mediocrity is not a hard thing to come by in the metalcore genre. In fact, since every metalcore band has decided to rip off Prayer for Cleansing and Heaven Shall Burn, metalcore has become a little too stagnant in this As All That Killswitch Remains Dying "scene." She Killed Poetry would easily fall off the radar for me, for this band is the definition of insignificance. I'll start with the first impressions since that's kinda what sunk this album in the first place: the cover art is terrible. Shut Out the Silence's cover art is a photograph of a topless girl in some painful pose (dying dramatically?) with the colors washed out. Of course there's no actual nudity, there's no fun allowed in this type of metalcore. The band are a bunch of sweatband sporting guidos who I'm sure can be found wherever the proverbial party is at in Fort Worth. Seriously, there's enough tanning lotion and hairgel in this promo picture to sate the VIP room at the Crowbar. The promo says the band is for fans of Ion Dissonance and Between the Buried and Me, which is pretty accurate, but it's also no coincidence that there's a hundred other bands signed to a label that sound exactly like this.
The promo sheet said this band was an "interesting sound on melodic metalcore," which is obviously a crock of shit since everything concerning the music has been done much better already. Well, what about the music? Like most metalcore, it really has NOTHING to do with hardcore itself other than the breakdown, which is considered a distinctly metal mosh part anyways. So really what we have here is a nu metal record with too many mosh parts. I was surprised by the song "She's Living Just Like You," which happens to steal its first mosh part from Buried Alive's book. Of course all my hopes for this song were dashed when they just went back to full on chugging away. It's as if they aim to be only sufficient at what they do instead of just doing something original. The only redeeming quality this record has - and this is speculative at best - is the guido image appeal. Hopefully this gets played at nightclub hotspots and guidos begin hatemoshing and drunkenly kill each other over who stole whose dancing space.
