Blind To - 'Promising Dreams, Delivering Nightmares'
'Promising Dreams, Selling Nightmares' presents something of a challenge for your humble reviewer in that it's difficult to cobble together 400 words about an album which is so thoroughly unremarkable. Even the accompanying press release struggles to muster much enthusiasm, and reads like a carefully coded statement which requires subtle deciphering. Mention of "a complex outfit" means we're in for almost entirely hook-free songs. When it talks about the band "drawing influences from a wide range of styles and genres, from hip hop's Jehst to punk's Strung Out to metal's Deftones and far beyond" it really means that they own no albums which were not released in the last decade and desperately wish that they were Americans, instead of hailing from Berkshire. For "lyrical content touching on emotional pressure, political grievances and society's madness in general" read: purveys a philosophy and outlook on life extrapolated from reading too many interviews with emo and hardcore bands and contains lyrics destined to be immortalised in Tip-Ex on literally dozens of school satchels. And "makes for interesting listening" warns once again that this is almost entirely hook-free music.
I'm being a little unfair to Blind To here. They're by no means bad at what they do, but what they do has already been done to death. It sounds as though the group have spent many hours in solemn study of the compilation CDs given away on the front of 'Metal Hammer' magazine and have attempted to create the ultimate post-hardcore-emo-nu-metal band, but this is music with more hyphens than actual ideas. There is nothing individual or original about this album; each track sounds instantly familiar. The musicians are more than competent, however, and manage to maintain an acceptable enough groove. The "soaring melodic vocals" are exactly the kind of thing you'd expect: impassioned high-pitched wailing which occasionally slips into sub-Anthony Kiedis/Zack de la Rocha rapping, generic hoarse shouting, and fragile breathy passages where you could hear the singer's little heart breaking if you weren't so distracted by his annoying wannabe American accent.
Still, it's early days yet for Blind To, and it's possible that they may yet find their own identity and develop in new and exciting ways as their career progresses. There's some minor but nice piano plonking in the tracks 'New Confidence' and 'Flex' which might be a productive avenue to explore further, and even a Philistine such as myself can appreciate the mellow and acoustic album closer, 'Tease'.
If 'Kerrang!' is still your favourite magazine and you can't get enough of that "inspired by the Deftones" sound then you could probably do a lot worse than pick up this well-played and well-produced LP. But I'm afraid this just isn't my cup of half-caf frappuccino with chocolate sprinkles on top.