If you’re interested in reviewing a bunch of obscure some of which are really good some of which are garbage most of which are how did you get our information — seriously, e-mail Timesboredom@gmail.com to join our team. We’re looking for a few decent writers, because for some reason lots of people want to be reviewed by us. There’s probably some sort of industry reason (maybe all European groups are desperate to have any reviews from the US); in any case we’re happy to get to explore and hear about all kinds of girls. That was an inside joke no one’s gonna get but us (join the team and we’ll let you know what it means!).

This is interesting; here’s one from an alternative rock trio in Rome. I’m sure someone else that’s as educated as I should be knows the answer to this; but why do all these European groups sing in English? Is that perhaps the secret — they’re trying to reach US audiences because that’s where the money is hence a review in a US zine would be tits…

Fortunately for them we do review pretty much everything we get that’s not offensively bad. Unfortunately for you readers (and perhaps The Junks because we honestly don’t know what they’re looking for), when we get bored we do tend to ramble…

And this music is boring. They’re not wrong in sending it to us as nineties alternative is likely to tickle our fancy, but it’s as though they have the wrong influences from the 90s or write in this vein in such an original or eclectic style it doesn’t do anything for us. And of course if the songwriting were really good we’d probably like it anyway — it’s clear the songwriting on Control and Abuse is good, but not really good. Certainly not good enough for us to sing the praises of an Italian (sorry, maybe they’re from the part of Rome that’s not really Italy — Vatican City maybe? — we Americans are notoriously dumb when it comes to geography and history of the old worlds) band that we’ll most likely never hear from again and probably got here by sending a blast of the same email to hundreds of US websites.

If you’re still interested (I’m guessing no one other than whoever sent us this The Junk’s record possibly is); Control and Abuse is a pop record that’s slickly produced. The band’s good enough that they could genuinely be a Runaways/boy band type combination of a bunch of great Roman scene musicians… not much info is forthcoming, other than that they’re an “alt-rock trio with folk and electronic influences”. I don’t hear any significant degree of either of the latter descriptions.

The record is rather a doldrum combination of Beatlesque songs most of which are typically downbeat; there are exceptions but songs like “Can’t Be Sad Like Leonard Cohen” are so transparently an uninspired group that decided to write a song that sounded like Leonard Cohen (perhaps this is the ‘folk’ to which they refer) but they ‘weren’t sad enough’. And while they’ve obviously heard plenty of nineties alt rock, all I hear is the Beatles influence on Nirvana coming through; similar to international groups that aped grunge twenty years ago only to end up sounding like Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin without the filter of American punk rock or hardcore.

We’d go on, but honestly they haven’t earned a review by our hand. Honestly, we’ve probably skipped over better bands. And if we hadn’t begun writing this as we listened to the album (we didn’t even make it the whole way through honestly) we probably would have/should have skipped this one too. Sorry The Junks, your made for tv alternative rock doesn’t sound like anything authentic from here nor does it include any Roman influence to make it interesting enough to put your spin on our popular music from the nineties from over there.

-xxSTevexx