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CD Review - The Bangkok Five - We Love What Kills Us The Bangkok Five - We Love What Kills Us


The Bangkok Five - We Love What Kills Us

Long Live Crime Records/Sony/MRI

June 18, 2008, 02:16 PM

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We Love What Kills Us by The Bangkok Five starts off on a high with the energy levels consistent with a child suffering from ADHD. The title track has everything that you could want from a song. A great front man, some well executed harmonies, good structure and a little screaming to top it all off. What's cool about this track is it's originality sound wise and the fact that it is fairly hard to put into any one particular genre.

The first major issue I have with this album is the production. Some people purposely and cleverly go for the under produced sound however, in this instance I think it would have benefitted The Bangkok Five to have hired a better producer and a better studio to fully maximize their sound. It's a ballsy move to record live (as they did with some or all of the tracks on this album) HOWEVER you can do this and still have a nicer, more polished sound that will offer a bit more mass appeal as in parts this album slightly resembles demo recordings.

There are a bunch of bands I hear heavily in this album which makes for a really weird and obscure yet original combo. Queens of the Stone Age and Hot Hot Heat are the two major influences that pop up throughout this album. Queens of the Stone Age for the guitar riffs and tones and Hot Hot Heat due to Frost's vocal tone, style and range. What's cool about this band is their ability to go hard and raucuous and then chill out and show their more melodic side.

"Outline of Us" ends aand it feels to me like it is the end of this album. For me I wish it had been. Up until this point I was quite enjoying The Bangkok Five but the next five songs that lay ahead completely changed my opinions of the band. The latter half of the album consists of Spanish songs. I personally am not a fan of foreign language music as I don't feel it sounds as natural when sung as English and I don't think it works aswell - plus I don't understand the lyrics which is important to me when listening to music. Other countries appreciate and fully understand this which is why they release english versions of most of their tracks.

I feel that The Bangkok Five are trying to be too many different things for too many different people and don't appear to have a clear direction. This bothers me slightly as they are blatantly trying to have their cake and eat it. I would suggest that for them to be fully embraced by English listening fans that they make an English album. Hell, if they wanted to they could make an English and a Spanish album focused at both markets. That would be a smart move. Combining both on to one album is quite possibly the dumbest mistake I have seen a band make in quite a while as chances are you are alienating both of your two markets.

It's not that I have anything against music in Spanish I just wouldn't listen to it and sneaking five songs onto the end of an album after falsely lulling me into liking you is not a tactic I am fond of. Had this album remained in English at the standard of the start of the album I would have envisaged giving this a 7 or 8/10.












Review Rating

 
Overall Rating
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4
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Reviewers Tiltn/a

40%






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