"I lost my inspiration/Lying in your bed/But you cannot rape the willing/And you taste like self-destruction/I’ll follow where I’m led/But you cannot rape the will-ENNNGGGG!!!"

Yes, I’m well aware that’s shite.

But oh, that’s just a taste of the lyrical glories in this beauty. As you may have guessed, we’re in the ‘depressingly clean-cut emo-mall-punk’ aisle, and the shelves are fucking rammed. You’re excepting a wussy-assed ‘screamo’ bit? Emanuel are going to give you TWO! And you can tell it’s not proper screaming because you can make out all the words!

“EVERYONE’S DEAD EVERY DAY IS LIKE A KNIFE-FIGHT!”

Seriously, we’re dripping with it. “Get high and try that’s all I really wanna do!” Lead singer boy (he’s called Matt, and should probably be congratulated for heroically avoiding being called Seth or Josh BECAUSE HE DOESN’T HAVE TO FOLLOW YOUR RULES!) seems really fond of that one. He also looks bizarrely similar to Jeffrey Lewis.

“I count the days and watch your fires burn/Just give me time to blow them out”

And the trouble is that there’s a dreadfully catchy and stupidly fun pop song under all of this. Totally predictable, of course, but it’s one of those where everything gets polished and over-planned to such a degree that somehow it miraculously avoids sucking. The electro-siren-buzz-ting that the guitars do marries with the horrendous nasal whelp that is his voice (he sounds even more like you’d expect him to sound than you ever believe), hammering that chorus along, picking out the stresses and bursting them in the eardrums. The slow bit comes in exactly when you’d expect it, but that’s only because it’s exactly where it should be. Yeah, the verses are annoying, and the repetition-with-slight-variation of the lines is obviously nowhere near as clever as he thinks it is and makes you want to nauseate on him, plus also the amount of times he says he’s dyyyy-ing… uck uck uck. But somehow, it’s irresistible. So fake it’s beyond fake, someday you will ache like he aches, assuming you haven’t turned 15 yet.

By William B. Swygart, editor of the UK Singles Jukebox at Stylus