When I was in high school, I always joked that my band's first album was going to be titled "Self-Titled Debut Album". There's a certain hilariously stereotypical aspect to a band not bothering to title their first album, especially when it sounds like the band recorded the entire album in between classes at their local high school. Strata fall into this stereotype nicely, by being as dull, generic, and angsty as most high school bands, recycling the same riffs over and over again, featuring lots of screaming in their lyrics, and of course, self-titling their debut album.

Just because this album is amusingly stereotypical though, it doesn't mean that it's fun to listen to. Nope, in fact, this music is so generic and bland, that it's almost as if the band is insulting their listeners. It takes skill to make bands like 3 Doors Down and Nickelback sound distinctive and passionate, but Strata manage to do it here, and enrage embittered music reviewers like myself at the same time.

"But what prompts such a hostile reaction to this music?" I hear you ask. It's a good question, since I usually go out of my way to find the good points in anything I listen to. I've found that there are very few albums that don't have at least some redeeming features, even if they're so flawed that I want to take my review copy of the album out skeet shooting. On "Strata" though, the band have truly come up with a landscape devoid of any positive points. There are no redeeming features here, at best, the instrumentation is mediocre, the songwriting is average, and the singing is murky and indistinct.

The album starts off with Piece By Piece, which manages to cram every single grunge cliché in the book into it's three-and-a-half minute runtime. Lots of vague screaming, sludgy guitar riffs, and simplistic, repeated vocals make the song a complete waste of time. Just when you think it can't get any worse, along comes I Will Breathe Fire, which opens with what sounds like the very same riff that was used in Piece By Piece. A relatively clear and undistorted chorus, a bridge with the same chords as the chorus, but reversed, plus lyrics containing the words "I keep falling..." pretty much complete the cliché trifecta.

Really, this review might sound a little vicious and a little unnecessary, but I feel I'm not going to be doing anyone any favours if I try to find positive elements in this mess. Music and bands like this probably has Kurt Cobain spinning so fast in his grave that if you attached turbines to his feet, you could power a medium-sized city. It might be cruel, but I'd suggest to the members of Strata that they'd probably be better off pursuing careers as bank tellers and insurance salesmen.