By Jeremy Azevedo

A friend and I were talking the other day about the state of the music industry and the proliferation of “hip” bands rising meteorically from Silverlake and Echo Park like bottle rockets on the 4th of July, exciting at first, but ultimately fizzling out in a disappointing spectacle of epic fail.

The industry seems to take as fact the opinions of Silverlake/Echo Park hipsters, blindly firing record deals at every single band in the area and shotgunning them over the radio in a noisy hustle of sameness with really cool vintage outfits and ironic haircuts. After all, they were right about Beck and Silversun Pickups right? So why not The Airborne Toxic Event?

The problem with basing your business ventures on the whims of hipsters is that this is a sub culture of people that has no purpose or agenda, and no singular defining characteristic other than the OCD like quality to constantly be on the hunt for something "new" so they can pretend not to like the thing that was "new" last week. Not the best environment in which to try and cultivate a band that lasts for more than one or two albums.


C'mon, really?

The Airborne Toxic Event is just another run-of-the-mill Spaceland resident band, full of potential but still a bit undercooked. I am generally cautious about bands that have been together for less than two years, weren’t even in a real band prior to, and are being called one of the best bands on MySpace by Rolling Stone despite the fact that they have less than 10,000 friends on there, which by MySpace standards is pretty amateurish. Whose dick did they have to suck to get that name-drop, lol? Ooh, and guess what? The lead singer is a real writer, apparently! Somebody better call McSweeny's, we gotta live one!

Don’t get me wrong, The Airborne Toxic Event has great potential, and that song they have on the radio, “Sometime Around Midnight”, almost sounds as over-produced as a real band that’s actually paid it’s dues for at least a couple of albums before selling out. It’s too bad that they’ll probably be abandoned by their notoriously fickle audience before they ever have a chance to record a second album, because that one might have actually been really great.

Rating: 10 out of 10 fake reviews on Amazon.com by people that work for the label or friends of theirs that have haven't even heard the album yet.