Reviews

Honestly, I can’t stand screaming vocals. I can’t really judge if they’re good or bad because most of the time, I can’t even listen to them. Some old Thursday background yelling works for me alright, and I’m okay with well-integrated and occasional screaming vocals, but a constant onslaught of screaming is unbearable. No Hollywood Ending is almost exclusively screaming.
 
No Hollywood Ending is a metal band. But they really don’t sound like any of the current popular mega-metal bands like Atreyu or Avenged Sevenfold. No Hollywood Ending’s sound is much more condensed, more passionate and more energetic. It’s also louder. In fact, sometimes it’s nothing but loud.
 
Each song on Everybody’s Talking, their second album, follows a completely different format, changing multiple times within one track. For example, “Not Without A Heartbeat” starts with some screaming over chugging, lawnmower guitar, then goes into a hurried breakdown which then incorporates some strings which sound like the music accompanying tornado’s appearance in the Wizard of the Oz. The song then transitions into some My Chemical Romance-esque singing before reverting to the beginning of the song and back and forth until the song spins out of control and ends. Obviously, there’s a lot going on there. Despite the commendable attempt at variety, the songs still manage to blend into noise.
 
However, there were a few moments that caught my ear. The bluesy breakdown with layered vocals in “Sixteen Times” was a unique and surprising inclusion on a metal album. The starry, spacey guitar ending of “Dissect Yourself” plays on a Pink Floyd sound and offers one of the album’s few calm moments. All of these great moments are always immediately broken with more screaming.
 
It was weird actually, how this ridiculous amount of potential for something awesome would break the surface only to be sucked back into the dark sludge of fairly typical melodic, metal screamo. The album is dominated by songs like “Do You Copy,” which is nothing but that chugging guitar and a completely incomprehensible screaming. I wonder how Frankie O can get through three songs live without losing his voice completely.
 
These guys are obviously passionate. They made a very, very big album. They also tried really hard to make sure there were enough changes in song structure to avoid turning their sound it just noise. But the effort just wasn’t successful. It’s too big, there’s too much screaming, the chugging guitars are too dominant, it’s all just too much.