Albums

Album Review: The Hottness

Album: Stay Classy
Label: Ferret Music

With a name like The Hottness and a picture of an overfilled shot glass on the cover, you could be forgiven for immediately cracking out your striped spandex and mullet wigs for their debut ‘Stay Classy’, and you probably wouldn’t be far disappointed. Wielding a sack of rock n’ roll clichés that would make Mötley Crüe stand to attention, The Hottness power through 10 tracks of guitar-duelling, pinch-harmonic screamitude just as standardly as they can be bothered, then go backstage to pour whiskey into their eyeballs or whatever it is “southern metal” acts do for fun.

For a band who claim to be “breathing life into a progressively stagnant, deteriorating scene”, The Hottness sound remarkably like a sub-standard Bullet for my Valentine clone…for just about the length of the album, actually. The sound is tight and well-produced, and some of the riffs might just about manage to crowbar your toes off the floor for a minute or two, but they just don’t bring as much to the table as their blurb would have you believe.

I’m hard-pushed to find standout tracks since it all seems to blend into one 40-minute lump of “metalcore”, but there’s glimmers of something more interesting in the riffing of ‘Dearly Departed’, which sound occasionally almost Bayside-esque, before falling into an Enter-Shikari type chugga-wugga “SO BEAUTIFULLLL” oh-my-god-I’ve-heard-this-exact-same-fucking-thing-about-97-times screaming section. ‘Still Standing’ is a little more heartfelt than most of the stuff on the album and stands out as just about the only track I can still remember after 4 listens. It’s full of “sing/chant along parts for the kids”, which makes me dearly hope that “the kids” will drop this metalcore shit soon and find a type of music that doesn’t make me want to use the CD as a coaster after 10 minutes.

In summary then, the best way to encapsulate this offering is to listen to the first 20 seconds of the album, which consist of someone taking a piss and flushing the toilet. Make of that what you will.

For fans of: Every Time I Die, Maylene And The Sons of Disaster, Four Letter Lie
Band links = The Hottness

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Tags: album, cd, hottness, stay classy, review, metalcore, every time i die, maylene and the sons of disaster

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