Stars Are Falling / Skylines

Blood & Ink Split Series: Vol. 1 (2005)

Jordan Rogowski

Let me make this perfectly clear for everyone. No, your heart isn't bleeding. No, your eyes aren't tearing. And no, stars are not falling. What's actually happening is, 18-year-olds all over the country brought up on a steady diet of Senses Fail and Bleeding Through are starting their own bands. And who's worse off for it? Anyone in earshot, really.

This album is just like when you're at the bar with your friends, and you see a gorgeous girl at the other end of the room with a completely hideous friend. Stars Are Falling and Skyline have combined their powers of bad riffs and worse singing on this split CD, to form the musical equivalent of that hideous friend.

All the elements are so perfectly in place, it achieves a level of bad that is so complete, so thorough, you almost want to admire it. Almost. Long, clichéd, nonsensical song titles ("Who Needs London Anyway," "The True Comedy Of A Self-Righteous Man"), screaming that grates the ears, and singing that cuts directly through them. It's all a bit overwhelming. It's rare that a band can streamline their horrible approach quite this well. To be this believable of a carbon copy, these bands must have listened to every bad metalcore band that features an off-key singer, and just memorized each chord, each verse, each bridge, and each, awful, awful lyric.

There's not even so much as a point to differentiate between Stars Are Falling and Skylines, because the transition between each band's respective half is so seamless, so close, that you'd be hard pressed to tell that they're different bands at all. Breakdowns reside at the same point in songs, the nerve-trying singing appears in the same sections, and the lyrics are uniform enough between the two bands to think it's all just the diary of an angsty 15-year-old goth kid from the suburbs. That girl in their Algebra class didn't return their note, and their parents switched from DirectTV to satellite, and that warrants bad poetry:

A frantic collage of distorted love songs / Play back like conditional closed circuit stranglings / Almost bringing tears to my eyes / Now we're lost again / We're lost again / You'll find me on my knees

What's amusing about that particular song is that it's not actually a song at all. The first half of those lyrics belong to Stars Are Falling, with the latter half belonging to Skylines. You'd never know the difference; almost any lyric on this split is interchangeable with any others. It's like one horrible, cliché mix-n-match. No matter how hard I may try, I simply cannot say enough bad things about this split. I'll listen to some metalcore, but this, this wouldn't sell if they got a distribution deal at Dollar General.