Labels: Look Again Media – Love/Hate Records
Review by: David Giles
The promo sheet made me want to gouge my eyes out. It reads: “[Rapid Cities are] standing on the outliers of society and of the very subculture to which they do (or do not) belong, giving them the unique position from which to criticize, modify or completely misunderstand the world around them. You laugh… and so do they”. Why do I get the feeling that we aren’t laughing at the same thing?
Sadly, Rapid Cities’ music isn’t much better than the bowel movement of a promo sheet. RC play a bland and wholly unengaging brand of ‘post-hardcore’. In their favour, they obviously like their At The Drive-In, but to compare them would be criminal. The guitar work is uniformly unexciting, the ‘experimental’ (I guess) riffs are embarrassing and the singer’s voice is annoying. The tone is further lowered by the band replacing both ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ with ‘yr’ in the printed lyrics. The low-point of this album has got to be the track ‘the NRA and the NWA’, particularly where the singer shouts then half-sings “Charlton Heston and Eazy-E”. In an anti-gun song? Charlton Heston was a millionaire and Eazy-E died of AIDS. Oh dear. Maybe that’s their idea of quirky. Blame it on the barcode. This CD is on its way to the bin.