Screaming anything from "Hear the bass, hear the bass!" to "This world / They found / They lost / Their sound!", Stereobate too often tries to make their words sound profound via excess repetition and loud music. However, with their vocal performance varying from Beastie Boys-style yelling to Devo's robotic anti-singing, it's clear that they have style.

Their music, however, is not about the words. The majority of the songs on Selling Out in the Silent Era begin with a moderately-paced melody -- often a spaghetti western riff or a cosmic sound -- and morph freely from there. Their entropy-increases-with-time style takes them from softly subtle to heavy and hard-edged. This leaves you satisfied; instead of going from Verse 1 to Chorus to Verse 2, etc., you're taken from Point A to Point B, quickly and efficiently.

While Selling Out in the Silent Era has ample room for improvement, the music almost always clicks, making for several great tracks. This happens most often when Stereobate scraps the lyrics altogether; when they do this, they sound like a punk band imitating an experimental instrumental group like Tortoise. You can hear this best in "The French Letter" and "Club Med", two instrumentals in which the band isn't afraid to noodle around. On the former, a cosmic atmosphere gives way to complex melodies which, just as they carve their way into your mind, shift gears just enough to throw you off. "Club Med" is somewhat similar; it begins as either an homage to or a blatant ripoff of Tortoise's "I Set My Face to the Hillside". The song goes on for a total of seven minutes, in a vein similar to Fugazi's Instrument -- it's basically a four-piece-punk background, but it uses enticing rhythms and melodies to push itself into the foreground.

It seems that Selling Out... is trying to do for hardcore punk rock what Red Stars Theory did for emo. While the band adheres closely to the rules of the genre, they do their best to keep their music well-timed and melodic. You'll thank them for it.