If a kiss is deadly, then that is one intense case of herpes. Still, don’t hate A Kiss Could Be Deadly for their idiotic complete-sentence band name. Hate them for their crap music instead. Instantly forgettable and boring, each song on the band’s self-titled debut features the dangerous one-two punch of bland music and utterly generic and forgettable lyrics which only become memorable when they fall into the realm of self-parody, like on the chorus to the puntastic “Poison IV,” which beings with the line “And you – you’re so cliché.” Irony isn’t strong enough of a word. Lead singer Lauren Baird’s whining howl of a voice doesn’t help things, either. She can’t sing, and no amount of harmonizing keyboards or the ever-so-subtle effect of an auto-tuner is going to hide that. The only thing that makes AKCBD (wow, even their abbreviated name is too long) stand out at all is their reliance on keyboards. But adding annoying synthesizers to annoying pop/punk songs doesn’t make them any better. And their electronic edge will probably be their undoing, as it makes them not emo enough for the emo kids but not electronic enough for the electronic kids either. AKCBD (yeah, that doesn’t stop being annoying) is just Paramore with a keyboard fetish. (LABEL: Metropolis 2008)
