Life in the Midwest, outside of the urban centers, can be pretty boring. As a midwesterner I accept this and understand the inherent advantages and disadvantages. Usually, boring places just don't produce important music. Not only is it often prematurely denounced as unsophisticated, but it also generally deserves to be written off. Now Louisville is an exception, where boredom spawned one of the most creative, prolific music scenes of the 20th century and beyond. Chances are that happened because many extraordinary individuals just so happened to be alive in the same place and time. If you're a normal-to-below-average kid from a middle class family, your lack of cultural stimulus, coupled with the monotony of normal life, probably won't cause you to create Spiderland.

Dead Letter Auction's Romancing the Actors has little to do with Spiderland aside from the fact that it, like parts of Spiderland, is loud and has quite a bit of yelling. This EP has much more to do with early 90's emo and has everything to do with what boredom is doing to America's youth.

According to the address on the back of the jewel case, Dead Letter Auction are from Indiana, which helps to elucidate why they sound like a bunch of friends who get together occasionally to release their frustrations about their horribly mundane lives. For substantiation, I should point out that I myself am a proud Hoosier, but I also understand the unfortunate effect that this environment can have on disenfranchised youths.

To make a slightly hasty generalization, whereas the average Joe gets wasted on the weekend to relieve the torment of his work-week, the average hardcore kid emotes. This music certainly is cathartic, but that outlet of emotion is completely one-sided. The listener doesn't share in the release. More than likely, he becomes annoyed. The lyrics are vaguely political, ambiguous, and generically angry. The vocal delivery is, almost without exception, in the form of breathily shouted almost-trochees. The sentence, "We play in an emotional hardcore band" might be presented as follows: "WE play in an-emotional.(breath) HARDcore band." Needless to say, this becomes tedious pretty quickly.

Fortunately, the guys entertain on a comedic level. For example: "This life holds true to a dead act/ Drenched with stagnance from lack of will/ The stick in hand is a crutch to reel./ Pseudo-solace," from the song "Of Crowds and Curtains." I listened to the track again after having read the lyrics and still could not decipher the above passage for the life of me.

The songs on Romancing the Actors, unlike the vocals, aren't completely uninteresting, technically. Some of the rhythms and changes are halfway engaging, despite the rudimentary drumming, and are definitely beyond the average pop song in terms of complexity. Sadly, they're far from unique. Mostly, Dead Letter Auction come off as less proficient offshoots of 90's bands like Current and Shotmaker, and those bands never really offered too much of interest in themselves.

The justification for this EP's low rating, however, resides pretty squarely on the unholy production quality. The guys claim it was recorded in a studio. Maybe they meant to say "in a giant Folger's can with a duct-taped boombox." There are times when lo-fi production can illuminate and enhance musical material, but far too often it becomes an excuse for laziness. Similarly, the idea of DIY has grown into a means of rationalizing poor quality rather than inspiring individual and non-standard endeavors. Both seem to be the case here. If not, Dead Letter Auction have a completely incomprehensible sense of audio.

There are people-- mostly support-the-scene-at-all-costs hardcore kids-- who undoubtedly have a soft spot for bands like Dead Letter Auction. To an extent, it's admirable that they yearn to be a part of something that they see as significant. But outside of very specific social contexts, music like the stuff on Romancing the Actors is of little consequence or value in the fabric of modern music, where countless artists surpass the sum of their influences. While Dead Letter Auction are presumably genuine in their anguish, it doesn't matter. That's nothing new, and what's presented isn't done so in a novel or noteworthy manner. If it satisfies and feels important to them to create this music, I wish them nothing but luck, but I don't want to hear any more of it.

-Michael Wartenbe