Album: Crime Desire (2007)

Artist: Crime Desire

Label: self-released on Life’s a Rape Records

Where available/price: Lou’s Records in Encinitas for $10; online at myspace.com/crimedesire for $10.

Songs: 1) Untitled 2) Succubus 3) Nadir 4) The Failed Man 5) Your Perdition 6) The Vampire’s Spell 7) Confront Them 8) Society 9) Sense Pleasures 10) Quarantine 11) Shake the Temple 12) In Lucifer’s Grip 13) Alpha Male 14) St. de Sade 15) Comatose 16) Submissive ID 17) Community College Rock 18) Kneel 19) Lie Farmer 20) What It’s Like for Her 21) Hate Thrust 22) Nemo Impune Lacassit (sic) 23) Labido Reign (sic) 24) Immune Deficiency 25) ID Music 26) To Combat the Superego 27) Raskolnikoff’s Loop 28) The Adversary 29) Family Annihilator

Band: Colin Tappe (vocals), Matt Ottley (drums), Keithen Seabrooks (guitars), Mike Dias (bass)

The most obvious element of Crime Desire’s new CD is that they are deeply in love with themselves and think everything they do needs recording. What a shocker: it’s self-titled. Why you’d want to commit any of this to an archive I can’t understand. It’s melodramatic scream-metal muddied with laughably cliché Goth imagery. (Really? Vampires? That’s what you wanted to go with?)

Crime Desire plays their speedy, guitar-heavy rock with all the journeyman aplomb of a high schooler with his My First Metallica Play-Along chord book, and I can hear drummer Ottley scratch his temple and wonder where he’ll strike next.

The lyrical themes seem to have been researched by scanning Google and Wikipedia for “theatrical, standard, metal,” including trips into the territories of medical/psychological (“Id Music,” “To Combat the Superego,” “Immune Deficiency”), obscure references to literature (“Raskolnikoff’s Loop”), dark mythology and legend (“In Lucifer’s Grip,” “Succubus,” “Your Perdition”), and transfer of control (“Alpha Male,” “St. de Sade,” “Kneel”).

The best I can mention of these 29 (!) tracks is that they are each short, averaging around a minute and a half.