City Sleeps – Not An Angel

Man, I have gotten some pretty bad shit in my short time as a reviewer for ThePunkSite.com. I mean, “horrendous” might be more of an apt term. Just the nature of the beast; there’s a lot of garbage out there.

And yet nothing, nothing even comes close to how incredibly, jaw-droppingly awful this band is. Not An Angel is the shittiest record I’ve heard, literally, in years. From the stills of the blonde, tattooed woman, uh, laying in bed and washing her face that accompanies the lyric booklet, to the fact that the band looks like a bunch of pretty boys that are dressed for a Mad Max audition, to the actual overproduced, Dinsey-lite crooning pop-rock that they’re laying down, this album is mired in so much pretension, falsity and saccharine that I have a hard time suppressing my gag reflex when I listen to it. In that regard, they’ve done something that no grindcore or shock-rock band has done: this album literally pisses me off.

I mean, I can feel the desire for pointed, intelligent discourse go right out the window while listening to this; I pretty much just want to throw it out the window. City Sleeps is physical proof that you can have sleeves and plenty of product in your hair and not even come within spitting distance of being “alternative”, much less punk. Absolutely soulless, inoffensive music made for preteens, soccer moms, and childrens movies, they’re nothing more than an N’Sync-like boy band for the new millennium. Avoid, avoid, avoid.