It should be pretty easy to dismiss The Revolution Smile and their new album Above the Noise. The band seems to carry just enough complaints and personal baggage to seem like a carbon-copy of every angry-young-man metal and rock band that came before them. While trying to garner radio play and popularity, the band strives to dismiss the celebrity appeal of it all. The Revolution Smile sounds like it is trying to craft original music while staying close to the grunge and rock of the early '90s.
It would be easy to fault the band for the trappings of hardcore and nu-metal. They aim to make something worth remembering while using volume and thundering guitars to do it. When they are done pounding their instruments, the lyrics hinder their ambitions. Most of the time the band seems intent on mentioning metaphorical wounds and the bleeding that goes with them. When they do go beyond that, the words are often a minefield of lazy metaphors and dreary imagery.
If it were not for the standard lyrical content, it would be the archetypical scream that drags down the album. The vocals of Shaun Lopez are passable for this sort of production and certainly not enviable. He even loses a few screams when he winds down a verse.
After a few tracks that ramble on about loneliness, desperation and alienation, it seems like Above the Noise can be tossed in the back of the CD drawer and forgotten as easily as Meteora or anything involving Fred Durst.
Therein is the problem with The Revolution Smile. They veered a little too closely to the likes of Durst and company in the last few years. Durst asked Shaun Lopez, who had come from recently-defunct band Far, to join Limp Bizkit as a guitarist. Lopez turned Durst down and stuck with his own band, The Revolution Smile. But Durst did not get out of the process and went on to produce Above the Noise on Flawless Records, his own label.
Unfortunately, Durst's whining-while-swearing bastardization of rock remains. Tracks like \Future of an End"" depend on a chorus that is no more creative than ""You can blame yourself/ When you're running in circles."" At its core, the album is grounded in the masochism of metal and the rebellion of rock. The combination, while certainly potent, is mostly blunted on Above the Noise. It suffers from too much brooding and not enough contemplation.
Yet the album cannot be completely cast aside. At its beginning and end it manages to get out of the Durst trap. The first track, ""Bonethrower,"" sidesteps the brutal self-pity of late '90s rock to suggest something like defiance. Though Lopez is hung up with lyrics like ""You're holding me down/ You're holding me down/ You're making me drown,"" the guitar riffs redeem the track.
The second track, ""Payday,"" serves as an example of what can go right when metal and rock mix with a splash of pop. There is plenty of energy in ""Payday"" without wasting any of it on garbled angst. The song seems to gain momentum as it continues instead of running itself down like most of the song on the album. It might be a single spectacular track, but it shows what The Revolution Smile is capable of doing.
With the album's closing track, ""I Wish I,"" Above the Noise approaches the promise that the first two tracks possessed. The last song blends Lopez's wishfully wispy vocals with a breezy and laid back beat. It is a complete counterpoint, musically, to the muck in the middle of the album. Thankfully, ""I Wish I"" proves that The Revolution Smile can get Above the Noise, but just barely.
