Observing small children playing around with Fisher Price keyboards at a young and impressionable age has always been a source of adoration and entertainment for many. Be they over encouraging parents or badgering siblings, it's always amusing to watch a five year old tinkering away at their toy piano. The sounds that come from it are akin to that of a xylophone or at best, a renegade ice cream truck on a rampage through a neighborhood of demanding brats. Now imagine infusing effects like that into an almost postpunk/emocore sound.
The Chiodos Bros are the result of Taking Back Sunday and At The Drive-In bringing their three year olds to band practice with them. One might dismiss a sound like this as being gratuitously infantile and thereby immature, but before making an easy dismissal; imagine that these children were in their short three year life spans, raised up on a steady diet of not only synthpop legends like Depeche Mode and Soft Cell, but musicians like Béla Fleck and The Flecktones. The Heartless Control Everything, released on Search and Rescue Records is the resultant idea of this twisted and maladjusted vision.
On tracks like "Ravishing Matt Ruth", the mid-Western based band rages like every other band on the emocore scene might at the moment. Or so one might think upon first listen. After repeated listens, the discordant harmonies, crashing tinkertoy pianos and buzzsaw guitars all seem to become more cohesive. The almost Carcass-like screams only add to the confusion. The quiet opening of "Vacation to Hell" leads one to think that maybe The Chiodos Bros aren't as savage as the record's first three tracks might lead one to believe; that is, until the guitars explode in full force in perfect synchronicity with the surging synths. "Hathaway Lane" opens with tinkertoy breakdowns that scream of anxiety as if the band wishes they were UnderOATH with their frenetic scales that surge up and down like charts on Wall Street. Vocalist Craig Owens screams "What if tomorrow never comes?" as if it were a point of apocalyptic divide.
"Bulls Have Horn" opens with a classic piano riff that floats atop Craig's vocals before fractured screams break the silence within the solitude of the background and the rest of the band joins in with timed precision. The Chiodos Bros, with their childlike keyboards and frenetic guitars often walk on the thinly spread divide between cliché and genius. With The Heartless Control Everything, they show that they have the chops to do something truly striking in the indie scene, but somehow their sound still seems stuck in the sounds of the current emocore glut.
B-
