Before I start this review, I feel I must establish a disclaimer of sorts. This is not an attack on the ethics of Special Guests, nor am I lambasting them for not being “punk enoughâ€. They’re just shit.
And here they come, the wolves in sheep’s clothing. Leicester’s Special Guests are a band that are about as original and as inventive as their name suggests (every band I have ever been in or met has at one time flirted with the idea of calling themselves Special Guests “cos…like, it’ll look like we’re supporting the big bands!â€) but one that takes the offensiveness yet further. If you’re the sort of person that loves a good narrative please don’t read the rest of the paragraph – this execrable CD is getting no stars and I don’t want to spoil the surprise for you.
If music is a sandwich, then Special Guests are like one bit of mouldy bread folded in half: functional to a point (and you do recognise that this is indeed a stab at making a sandwich but an utterly pointless one at best) but offensively mundane once you start realising the wealth of fillings that could have gone into it. Musically, the promo is a bland rip-off of that blandest of genres, modern pop-punk, with stolen riffs and licks from…well, they all sound the same, don’t they? Fallout Boy, Yellowcard, Mest, Hypo Psycho, Busted…and the result is that it’s fairly interesting if you are seven and have no experience whatsoever of decent fast music. Long, drawn-out vocals and nasal faux-American whines, cheesy riffs that sound like they were constructed on a Casio, drumming that pushes about as many new boundaries as a dyspeptic snail…birds can make better music than this AND THEY HAVE NO FINGERS.
And this sums up why Special Guests are such an aberration: they are so aware of what is now called punk that they’re willing to steal the right image so that they can “make it†to whatever industry showcase they need to suck some corporate cocks at. Spiky hair (check), bags of gurning attitude (check) and star jumps (check check check) all feature predominantly in what can only be described as a package designed to look authentic but that only leaves a sour taste in the mouth. Included is a DVD of a video charmingly called “Just Another Slut†(yeah man, we’re worth listening to because we misinterpreted Blink 182‘s humorous honesty in being unable to talk to girls as actual sexism and bigotryâ€) which shows that while SG are aware of punk’s marketability, they’re too headcrushingly thick to actually understand it.
I’m an easy-going kinda guy that’s just passionate about music, and when I see something that I love being packaged into something inherently fake, it seriously riles me. And by riles me I mean it makes me want to saw off my own leg with a rusty hacksaw, put the bloody stump in a bucket of boiling acid while I firmly insert the leg (foot first, of course) into my left eye socket so that I have something else to think about instead of this fucking puke-stain of a band. If you live near them or ever get the chance to see them, please hurl abuse at them until they stop making noise.
Ben