"Falling apart, indeed"

The opening track to Scarlet's "This Was Always Meant to Fall Apart" is beyond cringingly bad.

"Man down! Man down! My God, we've lost another one," I said to the company of my empty car.

Decent hardcore bands are dropping like tears into the gnashing, mechanical maw of the emo movement. Which makes no sense at all. This horrific beast feeds on melodramatic melancholy, and most of these ex-hardcore outfits used to deliver exactly the ass-kicking fun to remedy such sentiments.

Scarlet scared me before, but for good reasons. Listening to their negotiation between the genres of metalcore and industrial was like driving 90 in 55 mph traffic: you know it can only end badly, but it's good damn fun while it lasts.

And that ending seems in sight for Scarlet. The tread is wearing on the back tires and they're starting to lose the ass end in the curves. The album's title seems ironically appropriate.

Guitarist Randy Vanderbilt exposes an awful, nasal singing voice he had yet to employ on previous releases: "Cult Classic" or their debut EP, "Something to Lust About." He seems timid about using it, only doing so in about half the album's songs. Though he simultaneously brandishes it like a teen showing disapproving parents a new piercing by making the first song on the album, "Obsolete," a melodic vocal mess.

Singer Brandon Roundtree's scream is good enough to carry an album. There's little reason to compliment it, least of all with meager melodies sung by a guy with an outright annoying voice.

The parts of the album that don't smack of emo appeasement show that Scarlet has not moved forward, but can still produce some good industrial metalcore. The movement from "Something to Lust About" to "Cult Classic" showed a band that could write a great EP, but a bit of a boring LP, and that is still the case. If they could expand on their pounding double bass blitz to include better, more inventive guitar lines, engaging the listener might cease to be a problem.

The album's best feature is probably its production, which is a compliment to the band. Vanderbilt and drummer Andreas Magnusson know what they're doing at the mixing board better than most hired producers. If you're testing out a new system or pair of headphones, this is a great album to test the levels.

Scarlet is hardly a fatality in the war on mediocrity, but they have been wounded.