The Suicide Machines
The Suicide Machines (Hollywood)
by Marc Hirsh
The Suicide Machines
The Suicide Machines (Hollywood)
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in Space City Rock, Fall 2000
The Suicide Machines is not a good album. I want to make that perfectly clear right from the start. It is gimmicky, hollow and smug. I was tricked into buying it by a misguided and rapturous review which likened the Suicide Machines to a modern-day Wonders (of That Thing You Do! fame), and I feel used and lied to. The band is actually more like what Fountains of Wayne would be without a melodic sense or romantic streak or clear identity. They try to grab the listener's attention any way they can (within the hardcore-emo-punk-pop-ska spectrum) by creating the empty illusion that something good is bound to show up at any moment.
I can barely count the number of cheap tactics that the band uses to get our attention. These include: a love song to their dog (a ploy used to infinitely better effect by Paul McCartney, who at least had the decency not to give the joke away in the end); an ugly, ugly tune with a backing scream-along chorus of "fuck you!" (just the thing to put this on permanent kegger rotation at frathouses everywhere); and, most despicable of all, a cheap and entirely misguided cover of an ironically unhip song. Limp Bizkit did the exact same thing with their execrable take on "Faith," and the Suicide Machine's runthrough of "I Never Promised You A Rose Garden" (complete with a pointless and misused string section) begs the same question: why bother wasting your time and energy (and the patience of anyone listening) on a song that you obviously don't even like?
There are no answers, of course, because the Suicide Machines haven't thought that far ahead. Their problem is that they don't know what to do with the attention they desperately crave once they've got it, nor do I think they even care. Just as I have a general rule that a good album can withstand a handful of so-so cuts, I suppose that I'll accept the reverse and state that, although I have no desire to wade through the dreck to find them again, there are surely a few listenable tunes on here. That doesn't mean that The Suicide Machines isn't lousy, though. Its best tracks would be the worst ones present on any halfway decent album. Here, all they do is just break the mood and let the listener catch his or her breath until the next truly awful song.