Scream America! [Single] by Tokio Hotel (CD, Dec-2007, Interscope Records USA)

For Tokio Hotel fans, this single marks an important first in the band's history. Scream America! is the first Tokio Hotel CD ever officially released in the United States. Much of Tokio Hotel's already extensive discography has been independently imported into the United States by private specialty music dealers prior to this release. However, Scream America! marks the band's personal debut into the American market. The band's parent record label Universal Music Group initially approached mainstream North American audiences with extreme wariness. This caution defined the band's very limited initial touring schedule in the US and Canada. The label was concerned the band's monumental success, its recordbreaking CD and DVD sales and sold-out tours was a strictly European phenomenon that wouldn't repeat itself across the Atlantic. It goes without saying those concerns have been long been dismissed. In their defense, the label didn't have the advantage of hindsight this reviewer does.

At the time, the circumstances surrounding the single's release demonstrated the label's hesitancy to fully commit itself behind a full-scale North American promotional campaign for the band. Universal Music Group released Scream America! through the Cherrytree imprint of its American subsidiary Interscope Records. This was done to take advantage of the imprint's particular emphasis on promoting emerging artists. The single was released December 11, 2007 to take maximum advantage of the Christmas buying season. The label then further narrowed its focus on what it felt would be the band's most likely target market by selling the single exclusively through the alternative clothing store chain Hot Topic. This move also served the secondary purpose of limiting financial losses should the single prove commercially unsuccessful. Prior to its official release, the band's official YouTube channel began promoting the single on December 05, 2007 in Tokio Hotel TV Episode 5. The single, in keeping with its exclusive limited release and the massive success of Tokio Hotel, is no longer available commercially.

Scream America! has two tracks. The first, "Scream," is also found on Tokio Hotel's first English-lyrics album Scream. The second, found only on this release, is the AFI/Blaqk Audio Remix of "Ready, Set, Go!". Jade Puget's remix reflects his equal capability both as a guitarist for the band AFI and as a keyboardist for Blaqk Audio. The track is substantially more synthesizer driven than the original while also being several seconds shorter. In spite of this, Puget's careful texturing with the synthesizer serves only to enhance the band's single greatest musical strength: the astonishingly lush voice of singer Bill Kaulitz. Kaulitz's vocals have a honeyed plaintive intensity that allows no ambivalence in the listener. Those who prefer a harder, angrier or rawer sound in their bands will undoubtedly go elsewhere. Their absence won't be noticed by the many thousands of North American fans who are joining Tokio Hotel's global fan base, now several million strong and growing.