Fancore

Tween-heroes Metro Station’s have recently attracted a lot of attention, making a few ’bands to look out for this year’ lists. The hype could possibly be to do with the world’s current boner over synth-pop or maybe it could be what we call the Hannah Montana Factor. Yes, Trace Cyrus is the ‘super hard’ brother of current tween wet dream Miley Cyrus. And although the band are proclaiming to aim for an audience that’s a little older, the album can surely only be aimed at the pre-tweens that are currently turning Miley Cyrus into a superpower.

From the look of Trace Cyrus’s mean face on Myspace you expect him to sound like Oli Sykes, all scowls, piercings and sleeve tattoos. It’s a wonder then that what you actually hear is lots of pain-stakingly generic synths tacked onto embarrassingly weak lyrics. Trace doesn’t so much growl as emit a high whimper. “I know you’re dying to take off your clothes”, Oh STFU.

The shallower than a kiddies pool lyrics of Control -”I’m coming down/Bring me up/Take it off/Let’s just touch”,- (Insightful eh?) is just an example of the clearly overt attempt to get pre-teens to engage in underage sexual activites. “I know you’re dying to take off your clothes”, isn’t exactly subtle is it?

Aiming at catchy choruses, they’re a prime example of another band that has jumped onto the current pop-disco band wagon. Whereas bands like You Me At Six, make derivative pop music that masks itself as being rock; Metro Station are purely a pop outfit. Despite mis-guided likenings to Fall Out Boy and Panic At The Disco, fans looking for the same sophisticated lyrics and any sort of depth in Metro Station will surely be disappointed.

The most positive thing I can say about the band, is that the backing synth of  the patheticly whiny single ‘Kelsey’ sounds suspiciously like that Hilltop level of Sonic The Hedgehog 2 from the immortal Sega Megadrive. I wouldn’t be surprised if you heard Sonic and Tails jumping in the background, or maybe they edited that bit out.

Posing as an synth-pop outfit, Metro Station have no idea what they want to be. No actually, they do have an idea- they want to be everything. Emo? Pop? Electro? Clearly all they want to do is make you run out to your nearest disco and, ahem, “shake it, shake shake shake it”.

Aiming for the High School Pre-School tweenies is definitely a right move, because surely anyone over 13 wouldn’t buy into this?

Next Big Thing? Possibly, in the current musical world bands like this are sure to milk the trends until the audience’s pocket money is all gone. But thankfully, it’ll only be a matter of time until the next trend rolls in and we can get back to finding bands that are really worth being hyped as the next big thing in music.