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Box_, "Hello Special Glowing World!"
Emo vocals are to music as venereal diseases are to sex. St. Louis natives Derek Dobson and Josh Nissenboim might have had something going for them when they began recording this album, but their decision to include vocals can only be considered a lesson in how to spoil an already stumbling and poorly produced release.
Self Released
I wish every bad emo front man in the world would suddenly up and decide their real calling in life had more to do with acting than it does with making albums that pollute already choked and diseased air waves. I can name maybe two bands in that "style" with voices impressive enough to pull off the whole crying bit and even their careers have descended into a mire of stale and fake sentimentality. So, with that in mind, a record like Hello Special Glowing World! might be made into an instrumental album instead of a pop record with sometimes clever lyrics, but piss poor performance. Over the course of the entire album it's quite obvious that Box_ wants to make a record like Stereolab used to, but with an ear to the instrumentation and arrangements employed by playful electronic bands like Plaid. The only problem is that they seem uncomfortable with the equipment and programs they employ, so instead of unfurling layers of lush orchestral samples, they simply stumble through rhythm after rhythm and synth part after synth part.
I can't fault the group for trying to do something unique and failing,but the instant their vocals come into the mix, I'm a little more thanrepulsed. Their sing-songy delivery and half-dramatic posturing soundmade for MTV and add nothing to the music. In fact, even if they hadmanaged to record more appealing utterances, the very presence of theirvoices wouldn't make much sense and would still clutter the music.Above all, their voices dominate the record, so any creative outputthey might've mustered this first time around is almost completelyobscured by their... singing. On the upside, there are some fairlydirect and amusing lyrics all over the record, one being from the song"When I Try To Impress My Girlfriends Sometimes They Burn To Death orDrown in Very Cold Water." Aside from the title giving me a good gutlaugh, the lyrics detail a pretty fantastic scene in which a couple ofgirls meet ill fates at the hand of a boy too preoccupied with hisoutward appearance to do anything about it. Another song details howthe singer would love to play mix and match with the body parts ofvarious women, constructing a perfectly sexy and alluring woman fromdifferent breasts, lips, arms, legs, and so on. It turns out to be arather endearing song, but everything leading up to the end is amusing.
Hello Special Glowing World! is only six bucks and, as such, might be worth picking up simply because it has entertainment value. As a record it fails, being both clumsy and under-written. I hesitate to call the record crap for a couple reasons, one of them being that I'm from St. Louis, Missouri and another being that I did get a couple of good laughs out of listening to it. Listening to it right now I find myself wishing that the duo would've taken more time to add more to their work. As it stands, too much of the record is bare boned and frail, resting on just a few tricks and some badly produced musicianship gone lazy.
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