The teen market for metal shows no signs of shrinking. If anything, it's still expanding, riding the crest of a wave caused by a panoply of specialist television channels, internet radio stations and, of course, MySpace. There's never been a better time to be an ambitious young band who like their music heavy – your audience is so close that it can reach out and touch you with one click of a mouse.
So you'd better make sure you push the right buttons with your music. You can either find a niche you're happy in, or you can take the approach that In This Moment have used - which is to treat the various sub-genres and styles as a grab-bag. Beautiful Tragedy has everything but the kitchen sink caught up in the confines of its eleven tracks: female vocals that soar with clean melodies before descending into banshee screaming; chugging palm-muted guitar chords; bright plucked arpeggios and lead lines; ferocious fiddly fret-wank solos; blast-beats; big epic choruses; neo-gothic keyboard passages. Oh, it's all in there – wrapped around lyrics that are going to reach out to any kid who's the only one in their class that wears a lot of black clothing.
Of course, as someone far wiser than me once said, making teenagers miserable is like shooting fish in a barrel - not to mention it being one of the accepted and time-honoured modes of rock music. As overblown as the cod theatrics of lines like ‘will you be there by my grave, my beautiful tragedy’ may seem to me now, they're going to reach out to others, and I have no doubt they're written as heartfelt as they're delivered. The lyrics aren't the flaw of Beautiful Tragedy. The flaw is that it's just too approachable.
Not approachable by the average middle-class parent, of course. Far from it - they'll hate the sound of that poor girl ruining her throat for her art. But by trying to be everything to everyone, In This Moment end up being a little too bland. It's like a finger-buffet of metal – and the thing with buffet is that, unless the selection is made with great care, all that you can remember when it's finished is that you just had a meal of some description. Too many flavours vie for the attention of the listener at once.
That said, it's an ambitious album, skilfully performed and impeccably well-produced. And to a young listener who's not heard it all before, it'll be full of amazing new sounds and ideas. Which puts In This Moment in the position of being a kind of 'gateway drug' to the larger world of heavy music – which, in the current market climate, is no bad place to be.
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