Smile Empty Soul

06/09/2003 5:00 PM, Yahoo! Music
Bill Holdship

It will be interesting to see how the nu-metal crowd reacts to this young trio from Santa Clarita, California. In an era in which popular heavy angst bands named themselves after a certain vegetable that was found in diarrhea (the rest of the story, as reported in Blender magazine, is just too gross to repeat here) or celebrate doing it for the nookie, Smile Empty Soul stands out far above the current mod squad. Well, they do admit doing it for the bottle on the appropriately titled opening track, "Bottom Of A Bottle." But the music is frequently more melodic than you'd expect from anything this heavy these days, and the lyrics are more thoughtful than the current run of the mill. It was also mostly done live in the studio--this is a rock band, no turntables or samples, thank you. Leader Sean Danielsen is about as angst-filled as they come, but there is just something more dynamic about this group that makes it all feel real. They apparently don't consider themselves metal, but their music would hopefully appeal to the "Nowhere Kids," as they describe the crew back home in Santa Clarita, that mostly make up the young metal crowd. But who knows? It sure is nice to hear a 21-year-old reject the neoconservative thrust of his generation by writing a strong antiwar ditty titled, quite simply, "This Is War." It's sometimes dark and ugly--but the music is often powerful--and, hey, what isn't mostly dark and ugly in the culture these days?