With little room for originality in the screamo genre Oh, Manhattan seem to have wrapped themselves up in the most cookie-cutter of ways. Without a direct gimmick or marketing ploy to set yourself apart (such as Sky Eats Airplane being the “hardcore band with a synth,” etc.) everyone else gets lumped into one giant mess. Spiritual Warfare is exactly what you think it is. A hardcore album for teenagers who don’t know they’re listening to the flavor of the week because they were too young to have heard of underOATH when they released They’re Only Chasing Safety. There’s an “Interlude” song halfway through the album. In “Face of Another” Oh, Manhattan screams to the listener, “This broadcast is dead, no frequency heard” and anyone that was born before 1996 will probably think back to how awesome Thursday’s War All the Time was. To keep up with the clichés, the album’s first song is called “Guilty Blessings Pt. 2” with no part one.

However, the most interesting part of the album is the last song, “Ian Curtis,” that starts with another sampled quote, this time from someone close with Ian Curtis who says: “This was Ian’s first suicide note, and the weirdest part was that he’d never let you see the first one, it was so tempting.” This is extremely interesting to any fan of Joy Division, but then the song loses power when the lyrics, “Last night I had a dream/and Ian Curtis talked to me/and I said ‘how’d you muster up the strength, to tie that rope around your neck and kick the chair beneath your feet/because I’m not worth the water/that holds up my anatomy.”

This album is exactly what you think it is: angsty music for angsty teens who don’t want to wash the X’s off their hands from the concert last night to show off at school the next day.

(Indianola Records, 3014 Shelton Rd., Valdosta, GA 31606)