There’s a problem with art of all kinds – it tends to be an approximation of an experience or a thing or a feeling, and so, in a way, it’s always deliberately deceitful. The good art feels like the real thing and so we’ll happily be taken in by it. The problem is with the bad art. And the problem with the kind of emo-rawk alterno-metal that The Blackout play is that the very genre has the word ‘bullshit’ written in indelible marker across its forehead. From the anguished autotuned melodic bits, to the ‘scary’ metally hoarse-vocalled bits, to the heavily processed riffage, they cannot be taken seriously. And they add no innovations to the genre that make me feel they might possibly be ‘for real’. And seriously, I know that at root nobody is ‘for real’. All I’m asking really, is that bad bands dissemble more effectively.