Focus Reviews

Fatal Smile - Neo Natural Freaks
Style: Hard Rock
Running Time: 41 Minutes and 50 Seconds
Label: http://www.locomotiverecords.com


Hard rock... are you scared yet ? You should be, honestly Fatal Smile's 'Neo Natural Freaks' made me sick to my stomach listening to it. The only real saving grace of this entire CD is the musical accompaniment which occasionally has some stellar work. But for the most part remains pretty bland and contrived.

Album opener "Neo Natural Freaks..." (and yeah, they put the "..." after every songs title) is just absolutely horrendous lyrically, hackneyed rhyming schemes "freak" to "geek" , "cool" to "fool" et all. The rest of the album features the same horrible writing techniques rhyming too much in ways that just feel absolutely retarded. Trying to make it through this CD without laughing too much was an honest feat of amazing strength for me.

Guitar work here is pretty much barre chords with an occasional lead that seems familiar, though I can't place most of what I'm hearing with any specific band setting the trend for using it but its all really been jumbled together of bits and parts we've heard 100 times before. The albums main selling point is that this is a solid straight forward rock album. I can't deny that it is just straight forward hard rock. Theres nothing on this album that screams as anything else, theres no real experimentation with the genre to make Fatal Smile really stick out as a new being that hard rock has to deal with. Even the albums artwork can be picked on featuring slogans like 'Premium Blend', '100% Proof' and horrible looking tribal artwork that you'd be likely to find on the next Godsmack release.

'Neo Natural Freaks' has tried so hard to be the album that you need that it has just simply failed on all levels. Musically theres great moments and theres less than spectacular moments that leave you wondering what the hell that sound just was. Theres a real overuse of synthesized vocals sounding like robots/machines of some sort and it never works to the effect of any mood setting through any song. All of the songs are, for the most part, too upbeat for these sounds that feel completely out of place within the songs. Almost like they were meant to be Queensrhyce-ish in their attempts at setting the stage for a concept on the song.

In truth, I just couldn't get past my biased feeling towards this album off the rip, the songs lack deviation from one another, and sound very similar put side by side. The writing is laughable at best, and it seems like every songs title was ripped straight out of the song, and as the song opened they just had to let you know what song they were playing, as if they were playing the entire album live for you. Bottom line the album just wasn't my bread and butter, couldn't find myself ever really being into this and as for everyone else, listen to that first song "Neo Natural Freaks" and imagine that repeated TEN more times.

Score: 2.5/10