If you’ve ever seen or heard Black Veil Brides, the chances are you’ll appreciate why I scoffed on reading them cited as a reference point in the press release for Peepshow’s debut album. If you’ve managed to bypass the makeup-wearing zombie version of Mad Max meets Kiss for the new millennium purveyors of anthemic metal, count yourself lucky and move on now while you still can.
The front cover may suggest bad techno, but make no mistake, ‘Brand New Breed’ is a lengthy and excruciating piece of bad metal, and the band photo on the back cover renders this abundantly clear, and then to the power of ten. I know this and I haven’t even taken the disc out of the case yet.
The sample-laden, orchestrally weighted and portentous opener ‘Wake Up Call’ is unexpectedly creative and atmospheric, but it segues into ‘Let Go’ which is tame, lame and cliché. Hell, it makes Europe and 80s Whitesnake appear ballsy and dangerous. And it only gets worse. This isn’t the sound of rock music, it’s the sound of backcombed hair and spandex. Needless to say, they’ve got a slow-burning lighter-waver around halfway through in the shape of ‘Only a Dream’, which features an epic guitar solo... but then, so do the majority of the songs here.
The titles are cheesier than a Goodfellas four-cheese pizza: ‘Live Free Or Die’; ‘All or Nothing’, Waking the Dead’; Romance is Dead’, and the lyrics... please, no. ‘I got lost in the thrill of it all / The day is dead / The night lives longer’ and ‘You’d better learn to fight / Cos this world is a stage / In the circus we call life’ really is as good as it gets. How many times bands wheel out threadbare lines like ‘you can run but you can’t hide’ and references to firing lines and Jeckyll and Hyde and scars and all that cal and get away with it?
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You’ve probably got the point by now, but just to be clear: this is the worst kind of posturing, preening, cornball glammed-up rock bollocks, made all the worse by how very seriously they obviously take themselves and their lyrics. The sad thing is there are legions of studded belt and biker jacket wearing knuckledraggers who still think it’s 1987 who’ll think it’s absolutely ace. Shoot me now.
Peepshow Online
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