As a native English speaker, I're lucky. Do you know why? No, it's not because my first language is the de facto lingua franca of the twenty-first century, making language barriers irrelevant to me and allowing me to wallow in monolingual cultural ignorance. It's because my inability to speak or understand German has largely spared me from knowing about German emo-pop/visual kei band Tokio Hotel. However, ever ready to inflict the pain on a wider audience, the band have repackaged songs from their first two albums in a new, English language package in an attempt to make it in the United States.

Lucky us?

Truly, if these are the picks of the best that the band has produced so far in German, then I'd hate to hear the songs that didn't make the cut. Each and every song on "Scream" culls from the absolute worst parts of the emo, visual kei, and glam rock genres, producing an end result that is as painful to listen to as it is baffling to understand why it had to be recorded for a second time.

Any attempt to dissect this mess would be about as useful as attempting to determine just which parts of a heavy sack beating by a bunch of lepers was more or less enjoyable, but in the interests of public discourse, I'll briefly go over it. The actual lyrical content employed here is in many places laughable, consisting of banalities and clichés that I would never have admitted to even as a teenager, let alone committed to tape. If you don't believe me, check out the chorus from Forgotten Children, a truly hamfisted attempt at attempting to demonstrate a social conscience: "Lost and so alone/Born but never known/Left all on their own/Forgotten children". There is so much suffering in the world that there should be no shortage of things to write about, but the best that Tokio Hotel seem to be able to manage is something that sounds like filler in some goth's poetry diary.

Even getting away from the truly awful lyrics (and I cannot emphasise enough how absolutely terrible they are), the instrumental skills of the band are nothing special. Not that I'd know if they were mind you, because everything is covered in a thick, treacly lacquer of overproduction that would make a Coldplay album sound natural.

It's instructive that in doing research for this review, I discovered that a large amount of the online fan community seems to be more interested in performing sexual acts on the singer of the group than in actually listening to their music. This is not surprising, since not only does it clue you in on the sort of people who actually follow this band, but it also demonstrates that even the band's fans can't actually bother to listen to this nonsense. If being able to hear Tokio Hotel more often is the price of learning to speak German, I think I'll stick with English, thankyou.