Make Yourself Sick (Ferret) tries to refine and expand the formula
Boys Night Out debuted with the 2002 EP
Broken Bones and Bloody Kisses, but while it has its moments, it's ultimately stalled by its own ambition.
Boys Night Out is essentially a pop-punk band, keeping the pace upbeat and singing highly melodic and catchy songs about soft-focus pap like youthful love and heartbreak. However, the band also shares metalcore's love of jarring aesthetic shifts, not to mention screamo vocals. The result is a song like "I Got Punched in the Nose for Sticking My Face in Other People's Business" (only the first of many cheeky song titles), which begins as an exuberant
Get Up Kids-style anthem full of giddy lead guitar and boyish lead vocals, but is periodically visited by the tortured, shrieking spirits of screamo. While vocals like this are usually meant to be arresting, in the context of
Boys Night Out they seem like a hard to justify anomaly, their visceral power dulled by an inability to sync with the band's truly promising melodic pacing. "First Time It Shouldn't Taste Like Blood," "Decent Human Beings," and "I Was the Devil for One Afternoon" all find their rousing emo and pop-punk dynamics marred -- or made better, depending on your point of view -- by smudgy metal chording and tooth-shattering yowls. By the time "Anatomy of a Journey" rolls around -- with its awkward jumble of bloodcurdling screams, wistful emo melody, and pious church organ accompanied by a solemn group vocal --
Make Yourself Sick has become a disorienting, frustrating mess. There's so much potential for innovation here, especially since all of the genres
Boys Night Out touches upon need just such an infusion of creativity. But haphazardly slamming together their elements and gluing the pile with detours into drum programming, balladry, and digitally tuned vocals just seems like an overly ambitious way to do it.