Hollywood Undead – Swan Songs

At first, I believed that Hollywood Undead represented everything I disliked in music: the rise and fall of trends, the disposability of insubstantial music, an explosion of popularity resulting from the blemish on pop culture’s face known as Myspace.com, etc. Coincidentally, the same things that I dislike about living in the Hollywood/Los Angeles area; hmm, cruel irony or fortuitous circumstance?

For those of you who don’t know the bedtime story, Hollywood Undead began as a couple of kids posting homemade tunes on a Myspace.com page; they garnered thousands of “friends” (fans?) via their free internet vehicle, and bippity boppity boo, they were playing shows to the masses and recording their first full-length album Swan Songs (complete with some of their early Myspace prototypes, of course).

With that said, when I first gazed upon Swan Songs, I was less than enthused about reviewing such a record. I did, however, try to listen as objectively as any journalist could and found myself (for the most part) pleasantly surprised.

Halfway through the first track, “Undead”, I realized very guiltily that I was enjoying the sugary, bubblegum rap rock. Frankly, it’s hard not to enjoy it in the same way that you enjoy fast food, supermaket tabloids rife with celebrity gossip, (in my case) too many pints of Guinness and everything else that’s so good, but so bad for you. It is the ultimate guilty pleasure. Most of the songs are superficial at best, with lyrics that revolve around partying and playin’ da ladies (seriously, the second to last track is called “Pimpin’”), but they are undeniably catchy. Much like grudgingly admitting that the chauvinistic muscle-head frat boy is, in fact, really cute, Swan Songs swaggers through your speakers in the same self-confident, cocky way. For these reasons alone I gravitated towards “The Diary” and “Paradise Lost” as favorite tracks and the album’s saving graces. They provide an excellent foil to songs like “Bottle And A Gun” a ridiculous waste of three minutes and twenty-two seconds. It’s hard to take lyrics of hardcore badassery (“If ya got beef, then ya better step up/ cuz the Hollywood Undead ain’t nothin’ to fuck wit”) seriously from a group of masked Myspace boys rapping about Sunset Boulevard. In a similar vein is the fifth track, aptly titled “No. 5” that sounds something like what Eminem would’ve come up with if he was 19, drunk on 40s and had negligible talent.

Swan Songs works if you take it with a grain of salt. That is to say, if you go into it expecting to be blown away with philosophical lyrics, polysyllabic rhymes and artful melodies, you’ll probably be disappointed. But, on the other hand, if you’re looking for the soundtrack to that one crazy party when you convinced your wasted girlfriend to make out with her roommate and then you blacked out, this just might be the little gem for which you seek.