Band : I Set My Friends On Fire
Album title : You Can't Spell Slaughter Without Laughter
Label : Epitaph
Distributor : PIAS – Concrete Web Promotion Office
Release date : 07/10/2008
Release : CD

For the history of this Miami (Florida) based project, we would have to go back to August 2006, when singer Matt Mihana and guitarist Nabil Moo, together with a bunch of friends (all very juvenile indeed), started We Are The Cavalry (a self-claimed "Experimental/ Grindcore/ Southern Rock" act), and soon after recorded a demo (nothing they wanted to reproduce for serious promotion, but then music fans started asking about it, and Matt either sent those people the demo over the Internet, or burnt a copy on cd-R). With individual members coming of age towards the Summer of 2007, the second guitarist left for Texas to study at SMU, the drummer left on a 3-month trip to the Rocky Mountains, and Nabil was starting an engineering program...in other words, situations made the band split up!

But Matt and Nabil (who's not only a good guitarist but also knows his way around other instruments and electronics, enabling him to do music programming – as well as recording & mixing) still had a hunger, decided to do something as a duo, and in September they recorded a Rock/ Screamo version of Soulja Boy's "Crank Dat", re-titling it as "Crank Dat Cavalry Boy". Putting the song on their MySpace page, it suddenly got over 50,000 plays per day. So many in fact that the server decided to delete the account, suspecting the use of software to artificially increase the hits. By the time the duo had remedied the situation, dozens of impoters had opened I Set My Friends On Fire accounts, and the song found its way to Limewire. Incredibly, it appears that to date the song has been played over one million times!!! But things would become even more ludicrously successful, when ISMFOF first put two original songs ("ASL" and "Beauty Is In The Eyes Of The Beerholder", both tracks combining elements of Screamowith Grind – but not without calmer passages with clean singing either – and, in the case of the second one, even a bit of piano play) on their MySpace page, and then followed that up with a third one (the HipHop Rapper "HxC 2-Step" – say "Hardcore Two-Step"). To date, the songs have gotten over 4,2 million hits combined! Unnecessary to point out to you that a certain popularity was gained here? As a result, the band was getting several e-mails telling them that their songs were being played at homecoming rallies, and one kid even told 'em that ISMFOF was voted "favourite band" in his high school's 2007-2008 yearbook! Still DIY, the duo succeeded in getting a cover story in the Aquarian Weekly, and they were booked on Bamboozled 2008.

The record industry was boùnd to take notice, and so one day in early 2008 they were contacted by Epitaph owner Brett Gurewitz, who made a sorts of deal with the duo. As quoted in the bio at the label's website, "...You Can't Spell Slaughter Without Laughter melds the band's unique sense of humor (as evidence, simply read the song titles and lyrics) with an onslaught of Thrash angular guitar riffs, pulsing Dance beats, brutal breakdowns, sassy screams and lush melodic chorusses...," or, as Nabil states, "Our album is very eclectic and we feel that it will give the people something completely new. It has all kinds of styles woven in. The album is a typical relationship gone wrong, spanning emotions that include joy, uncertainty, anger, hate, confusion, alienation, and everything in between."!! Well, proof has already been delivered that the youth of America feels connected to both the lyrics (just check in on one of the several forums) and music, and not surprisingly so: here's a band it's cool to listen to, without really falling out of your peer pressure kinda thing! Indeed containing several styles per song, or at least on the recording overall (electro goes hand in hand with Thrash, Grind, Screamo, Rap HipHop, nice melodic – say harmonic – chorusses – occasionally with an Alt effect, and there's even the surprising piano passage here and there), here's an album no kid will be down-throdden for by his class mates...or it would have to be one-sided music purists, of course!

Check out some songs at either of the following sites: myspace.com/isetmyfriedsonfire, isetmyfriendsonfire.com, purevolume.com/isetmyfriendsonfire, or last.fm/I+Set+My+Friends+On+Fire (where you'll also find a total of 27 related videos), and dàre tell me you're not instantly attracted! Me, I've already put this album into my "Best Albums Of 2008"-list!!! Don't ask me how they'll manage (play on stage as a duo with a lot of their material programmed, or hire additional musicians to play the required instrumentation), but the band sets out on a nationwide tour of the States come November 10 (with dates lasting through Dec. 17).

98/100

Tony.