Credit: Found On Internet

With Metallica’s produced of choice, Bob Rock, on board, “Liberation Transmission” is certainly a long way from Lostprophets shoestring recorded-in-a-shed debut. Depending on your viewpoint, these lads are either articulating everything about being a teenage misfit that no-one else could possibly grasp, or pushing an easy-grade teen-drama soundtrack onto the youth of the nation.

Right from the staccato-burst of drums that announce the album opening on “Everyday Combat”, this is hometown angst writ-large. When Ian Watkins loudly declares “Because its not enough, we were growing up, we are giving up, and I won't hear what you say” in the less-than-subtle chorus to the in-your-face-obliquity of “A Town Called Hypocrisy”, you can hear the bedroom doors slamming across smalltown-wherever.

Is first single “Rooftops” really the cynical audience-manipulation that the naysayers would have it? Are Lostprophets pandering to a demand for emo? Packaging what the yanks give out and trying to sell it back to them? Or by replacing the punchier guitar hooks of the earlier stuff with smoother vocal melodies, is this modern Brit-rock making a go of something big for a change?

It’s not all close-fit leather jackets and skinny ties though. The somewhat clumsily-titled “Can't Catch Tomorrow (Good Shoes Won't Save You This Time)” recalls the band’s halfway point which they reached with “Start Something”, all pacey verses being pulled into layered anthems in the chorus. “For All These Times Son, For All These Times” harks back to the crowd-pumpers of old, with more energy than a thermonuclear tornado with A.D.D, with a crowd-baiting hook line that doesn’t feel cheesy.

Watkins still sounds like the boy from the Welsh valleys who would much rather be a Boy from Beverley Hills, and the jagged-edges of the band have been shorn down to a tighter, more precise product. Have the boys from Pontypridd grown into a band they always were heading for, or did they seize upon the thread of popularity given them and feasted?

“Everybody’s Screaming!!!” certainly echoes My Chemical Romance, which is either a good or a bad thing depending on your shade of nail varnish and the cut of your skinny-fit jeans.