Count The Stars
Never To Be Taken Alive

1.5
very poor

Review

by Knott- EMERITUS
July 8th, 2009 | 64 replies

Release Date: 2003 | Tracklist

Review Summary: Cookie-cutter pop-punk that fails on pretty much every level.

The young always have the same problem - how to rebel and conform at the same time. They have now solved this by defying their parents and copying one another. - Quentin Crisp

Every teenager is convinced of two things: that they have something relevant and important to say, and that they are different to everybody else they know. There are obviously instances in which these beliefs are justified, but for the most part they're a product of blissful naivety and the education system. There's nothing inherently wrong with this; society carries on around them, their parents struggle through, and, perhaps most notably, every 'tormented' teenager has dozens of friends under exactly the same illusion. Unfortunately, the combination of egotism and innocence that accompanies such a state of mind is also capable of giving rise to the delusion that other people want to hear about it. And they don't.

Actually, that's a lie; the fact that music like Count The Stars' Never Be Taken Alive exists is testament to the fact that there's an audience for it. Released on the ever-so-edgy Victory Records in 2003, they play music that's just about alternative enough to avoid mainstream radio, but still easily close enough to the cookie-cutter mediocrity of the world's most generic faux-emo pop-punk bands to appeal to an already-formed fanbase. In other words, if you could synthetically manufacture a hybrid of Bowling For Soup, old Drive-Thru Records bands and Mest, then proceed to remove almost all of the fun elements associated with those component parts, you'd find yourself with something resembling this record.

Power-chords and palm-muted guitars are the name of the game. So what, right? It's pop-punk. But every chord and lyric sounds recycled; First Time's instrumental backdrop is the same type of mind-numbing, over-used progression present in so many other songs from the genre, and Count The Stars don't even pretend to try and introduce anything new. The rhythm section is equally unoriginal, offering nothing in the way of a momentum change or adrenaline boost unless the idea is directly lifted from another band. It's shameless how little Never Be Taken Alive seems to care about its inclusion of these cliches. Just as an example, the album starts with that distant, half-muted chorus you've heard everywhere else. It's been a long time since that sounded original or quirky, but in its context here as the first thing you hear, it's excruciating.

On The Way Home's chorus gang-vocals are the same 'woah's you'd expect to find in an All Time Low or Sherwood song, but still don't manage to invoke anywhere close to the same response, and here's where the real major flaw with Never Be Taken Alive lies. Pop-punk is hardly a genre lauded for its originality. In fact, it's hard to recall where you've heard so many of these lines before, purely for that reason - they could come from anywhere. But Count The Stars don't even do it well. Their melodic sensibilities are weak to say the least, their structures and ideas don't just seem stale but also leave no impression, and the vocal delivery, while sounding like your typical scene frontman's, ranges from unspectacular to irritating. Never Be Taken Alive is a perfectly generic example of a band plagiarising a set of hackneyed songwriting techniques that will always appeal to adolescent pseudo-rebels, and not even getting that right.

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