Hollywood Monsters
Big Trouble

Once, a long time ago, there was a place where movie studios that created magic. They amazed those who viewed the silver screen, they created movies with unique ideas and stories. They told amazing tales. Fast forward a decade or so and the same place and the same studios did run out of ideas, repeated the same stories, copied others’ stories, and made sequels and restarted old movie series and remade what they had already succeeded with. Hollywood is no longer a source of magic, no longer a place of unique ideas. Hollywood Monsters, are they a view on today’s Hollywood film studios?

The title certainly tells that, Big Trouble is what creativity in movies seems to be at right now. French expat in California Steph Honde is the main man behind this band/project, and to his help he certainly has found rock music’s equivalent of King Kong, Godzilla, the Jurassic Park T-Rex and other scary creatures from the silver screen of the past. The cover art where some monsters ruin the iconic Capitol Records building which we have seen destroyed in many films. Wouldn’t that be something to spend a few hundred million dollars on making a blockbuster about, T-Rex versus King Kong in LA, that would be brilliantly bad with amazing special effects just like Transformers, Avatar, and what have you?

It is like the movies that comes to cinema today, uninventive, unimaginative and something we have all seen, in this case heard, before. It sounds like stuff from the past, I would guess the songs are remakes or based on songs by other bands. Good thing is that it is quite varied, the songs are of different character. The singer is good, singers should I say because there are a few of them. The production is a bit comme ci comme ça to speak the language of the director for this album. With 46 minutes of playing time and decent variation it might actually work for its entire playing time, unlike some of the movies I was just referring to.

There’s more like the reality of Hollywood films here, the album is alright to go through listening to with lesser attention but as soon as you start paying real attention you notice that it is the same tired clichés being repeated again and again. Sure it is not bad, it works okay but it requires that you feel a bit nostalgic, longing for a time when this music was the highest fashion. For the nostalgic, for the one not interested in creativity and new fresh ideas it would probably be something exciting. Although I would say it feel a bit incoherent at times, a bit too fragmentet but it works out alright for the most part.

I used a french quote earlier about the production and that quote can be used for the album as a whole, comme ci comme ça is just what this album is. Not wanting to be dismissive of these guys but there music feels as a good representation of the Hollywood Studios productions today, grande with a fine surface but once you scratch beneath that surface there isn’t really that much of interest. Kind of pointless drivel in a nice package, the nostalgic will like it though.

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