Swim to Drown - Fortress

God please kill me

People like me (read: people who are ensconced in the underground and hang out with metal nerds on the daily) don't realize something about the state of music today.  Namely we've successfully insulated ourselves from the "real world" outside of our little sphere of whatever metal we love.  Goats n' Gasmasks war metal, thesaurus aping brutality, high flying fantasy metal, shamelessly retro throwbacks, whatever it is you're into, you're probably into something like that if you're here and reading this.  I had a bit of a wakeup call a year or so ago when curiosity struck me and I started wading into the "new metal tracks" type playlists on Spotify, and I was struck with a stunning revelation.

All those "false metal" things that internet nerds used to be all up in arms about fifteen years ago like nu metal and metalcore?  Yeah, it's all still going incredibly strong, with a healthy scene populated by a zillion bands I've never heard of that have 30k+ Facebook likes with oolongs of middle school kids bumping this shit at full volume.  Crazy right?!  Turns out that "metal" is still a nebulous term that people have different definitions for, and the definitions that MA has been diligently (and correctly) excluding for almost two decades now is still around and kicking with no resistance.  Who knew?

I bring that up because imagine my shock when I came across Swim to Drown's Fortress in my latest promo batch.  I figured based entirely on the album cover and title that this would be more weepy death/doom since I've been getting a surprising amount of that, but no!  Swim to Drown is some horrifying bastard hybrid of Meshuggah and Limp Bizkit, complete with bouncy djent rhythms, turntables, and nasally rapping.  I like loads of stupid shit, don't get me wrong, but this is almost insulting to my intelligence in how brain dead and idiotic this is.

Fortress is the musical equivalent of a rubber chicken.  This whole stupid thing is loaded with dorky "comedy" that usually manifests in random videogame samples, vocals that sound like the quack that Ryo-kun frequently squawks out at the end of Maximum the Hormone tracks, and funky basslines that could have potential if they weren't surrounded exclusively by Z-grade rapping and bwongdong non-riffs.  Maximum the Hormone is a great band that utilizes loads of nu metal influences, but they surround them with fantastic hooks and huge explosions of manic aggression.  They're much more System of a Down than Korn, is what I mean.  Swim to Drown takes most of their influence from those fucking awful late 90s/early 00s nu metal bands that populated themselves with snapbacks and fratboys as opposed to tryhard edgelords in halloween costumes (Slipknot and Mudvayne at least had a few genuinely good songs, even if they were on accident).  It's the wimpy sentimentality of Linkin Park with the feckless bravado of Limp Bizkit, festooned in riffs that sound like ballsacks that conjure up Korn without the angst.  Some of you may recall I gave a very mixed review to Crossfaith like six years ago, and what it was about them that kind of entranced me was how it was dumb poppy metalcore with incongruous bass drops and dance beats that was clearly drying to capitalize on the dubstep craze of the time, but I couldn't help but kind of enjoy some of the songs for how unabashedly lighthearted and goofy they were.  They were catchy pop songs with dance beats and occasional chug riffs, but for as stupid as they were, they were at least sometimes put together in such a way where the obvious trendhopping sounded like a genuine attempt to write something engaging and fun.

Swim to Drown?  Fuck no, this is smooth-brained numbskullery of the lowest kind.  There's nothing fun here, this is just an album of aggressively moronic, low-brow, solid-skulled nimrod anthems.  I try to stay off my high horse whenever I can because I like a lot of pea-brained goofiness, but Fortress is too much even at my drunkest.  I know because I tried!


RATING: 4%

PRETEEN WASTELAND: Korn - Follow the Leader

I'm gonna keep the introduction to this latest series as short as I can.  Basically, I've mentioned here before that I used to be a huge nu metal fan, way back when I was a kid.  And I mean like, a little kid.  My mom bought the subject of the first review, Follow the Leader by Korn, when I was eight years old, pretty shortly after "Got the Life" was released as a single if I remember correctly (November 1998).  I remained a fan of the style pretty heavily until roughly 2003, when I entered high school and got really into thrash metal, grew my hair out, and suddenly thought all my old favorite bands were false metal garbage.  I've always said Metallica was my favorite band from birth until about age seventeen, but the next like six spaces were all nu metal bands (and Pantera) from 1998-2003.  So, now that I'm older and wiser and better at fart jokes, I got the itch to revisit all these old favorites to see if they actually sucked as much as I claimed.  Were there some gems hidden in the scene that I disowned purely out of snobby elitism?  Or were they genuinely terrible and I just came to my senses?  Only one way to find out, right?  It's interesting to me because I have precisely zero nostalgia for this music.  It's not like professional wrestling or something, where I can look back on it and recognize how stupid it was, but also still mark the fuck out when watching highlights of the 1998 Hell in a Cell match between The Undertaker and Mankind.  Hearing a Drowning Pool song somewhere doesn't make me wistfully yearn for the days when Sinner never left my CD player, on the other hand.  So I'm not going into this with any preconceived notions that I'll still hate everything or that I'll get bitten by the nostalgia bug.  Clean slate, totally blank, let's see what happens.

Also, just for funsies, I've also mentioned several times that the reason my taste in music is what it is at all is because of my mom's influence.  While that's certainly true thanks to her love of metal as a teenager in the 80s, it's not like we jam out Dying Fetus together nowadays or anything.  My taste obviously shot off in a far more extreme direction than hers ever did.  However, we did listen to a crapload of nu metal together during this time, because she fell in love with it just like I did.  So, in the interest of offering a second perspective and playing into my love of gimmickry, every one of these reviews will also contain a section written by my mom! 

Anyway, enough jibber jabber, let's explore my personal Preteen Wasteland....

Please stop following

When I got the idea for this new series, I knew right away that I was going to start with Follow the Leader.  This was the album that started it all for me, the catalyst that sent this angsty white kid down the path that pretty much every angsty white kid tread back in the late 90s.  You see, I missed the initial boom of nu metal.  Most people were introduced via that infamous "OOOWRE YUUUU REHDAAAAAY??" that opened "Blind" on Korn's debut in 1994, the album that truly solidified nu metal as a genre.  I didn't.  I wasn't aware of the earlier examples that still get some positive press like Korn's early stuff, Limp Bizkit's first album, Coal Chamber, Deftones, Sepultura's worst album, Soulfly, none of that.  I only came around when Follow the Leader roared onto the airwaves and turned the brooding, rap/funk infused wangst fodder into household knowledge.  So this is, to me, the only logical place to begin this journey.

And my god it's so much worse than I remembered.

You see, I know a lot of metal fans that still apologize for Korn's debut, and say that their early stuff was pretty good in its own way.  Maybe it's nostalgia talking for those people, I dunno, I haven't revisited their first album, but I can tell you that their third album here should be a blast of nostalgia for me, but it's really just reminding me that it's really repetitive, droning, and loaded with filler.

I'll just get the positives out of the way quickly, because there are a few.  Megasmash single "Got the Life" is pretty endearing for the dorky disco beat and the fact that the verses run on one of the few vocal lines with some sense of urgency.  And I can definitely give the band credit for keeping a creepy atmosphere over the top of several tracks.  "Freak on a Leash" and "Dead Bodies Everywhere" do this the most overtly, with the toy piano in the latter making several appearances, and the album as a whole uses a lot of off-putting high pitched squealy sound effects and guitar lines that lend a bizarre feeling of distance from the whole thing.  Like you're experience isn't really happening, the listener is just a sideline spectator watching the band experience a mental breakdown.  Granted, it'd be much more enjoyable if the music was all that good, but hey, the peripheral creativity is there.

The base music, on the other hand, is extremely repetitive and bland.  Four years and two albums removed from their debut which helped define nu metal, the basic premise wasn't novel anymore.  We've already heard the moderately funky downtuned grooves, we've already heard the pained groans from Jonathon Davis, we've already gotten two looks into his fractured psyche, it's been done already.  The band needed to do some new shit to keep things fresh, and to their credit they did obviously try to do so, with two heavily hip hop influenced tracks featuring, ya know, actual rappers (Ice Cube on "Children of the Korn" and Tre Hardson on "Cameltosis") and the aforementioned unabashed pop-with-heavy-guitars approach of "Got the Life", but the majority of the album just falls into the same tropes they'd made their signature.  Granted, you could argue that they're just playing to their strengths and should be afforded some leeway since they more or less invented the niche, but the bottom line is that it's not very fun to listen to.  The opening track, "It's On!" grinds along at a lethargic pace and just never feels like it's going to end.  The whole album is pretty grindy in that sense, and I don't mean like grindcore.  Yeah there's no influence from Napalm Death or Carcass here, I mean it in the literal sense.  It feels like metal-on-metal parts clanging and rubbing together, gears offset and jumping, like there's a rock stuck in your bike chain and it's just slowing you down and making this irritating KGKGKGKGKSHHSHSHSHSHSH noise.   It's why after all these years, "Got the Life" stands as pretty much the only song I can sort of admit to liking, because it's very kinetic and fluid, it feels like it's actually fucking going somewhere, unlike "Pretty" or "BBK" which just sort of sluggishly flop around in place like a two ton fish out of water.

But really, as lame and go-nowhere as tracks like "Pretty" and "Seed" are, very little strikes me as offensively bad.  Except of course for "All in the Family".  The track is ostensibly just a diss-rap battle between Jonathon Davis and Fred Durst, which should already sound like the worst thing ever, but holy lord after revisiting this for the first time in fifteen years I'm fully realizing precisely how inept the whole thing is.  It's simple, there's a hip hop beat behind Durst and a fat chugging guitar behind Davis, but the actual lyrics and rapping are legitimately some of the worst out there.  I'm not gonna trash all the homophobia and gay jokes they throw at each other because I mean whatever, rap has a very hypermasculine culture behind it and Durst is the embodiment of every shitty frat boy you've ever met so it's not really surprising.  But holy shit get a look at some of these lines.

"Too bad I got your beans in my bag
....
I'll check you out punk, yes I know you feel it.
....
right now I'm all it kid, suck my dick kid, like your daddy did.
....
I'm known for eatin' little whiny chumps like you.
....
Nappy hairy chest, look it's Austin Powers!
....
Look at you fool, I'm gonna fuck you up twice
....
You pumpkin pie, I'll jack-off in your eye.
....
You love it down south, and boy, you sure do got a purdy mouth."

Oh my god just fuck already.  Apart from both dudes having as much flow as a plinko machine and most of the disses just being weak as fuck (Oooooh your favorite band is Winger and you look like a dancer in a Hanson video (ignore the fact that Hanson didn't have backup dancers so I mean come on what the hell is the joke here?)) there is just so much homoeroticism bubbling up under the surface here that I wouldn't be shocked to see the two in the studio recording this song while longingly gazing into each others' eyes while inches away from each other.  They feel it, they run their fingers through their chest hair, they'll fuck twice, they'll finish on each others' faces, it's all there.   Man I'm know I'm just reading too much into a joke song thrown in to bloat the album further because it was apparently a law that every nu metal album needed to be over an hour long for some utterly unfathomable reason, but holy shit guys.  Just kiss.  Get it over with.  We can all see it.

Other than that, it's just a really boring album to sit through.  Overall it's pretty awkward and full of weird choices that jut make no sense.  Davis' signature gibberish scatting can be entertaining here and there but at this point it's just a dumb gimmick the band throws to the front of everything.  There's a random bagpipes part on "My Gift to You", "Children of the Korn" gives such a stark contrast between Davis and Ice Cube, with the Korn parts being awkward and clunky and going nowhere with no flow while Ice Cube occasionally pops up and utterly decimates him in terms of skill.  Even if these are, all told, pretty weak verses for Ice Cube, it's obvious which one of these dudes raps for a living.  Between the plodding non-riffs and whine-screaming there's just very little actual substance here.  In full honesty, when I got the idea to start this series and started revisiting these old albums, I kind of knew ahead of time which ones I would probably like and which ones I would probably hate, (and don't worry, there is some variety in my reactions, otherwise I wouldn't have bothered doing this if I was just going to shit out nine reviews picking on easy targets for a metal fan), and I genuinely thought that this was one of the ones I would find a lot of stuff to like in it.  I like funky grooves, I like albums with a genuine sense of anguish from people who are genuinely mentally unstable and don't know how to deal with it apart from the cathartic release of music (City by Strapping Young Lad is one of my all time favorites for this exact reason), I like individual parts that I remember this album having, but the whole package is so much worse.  It's less than the sum of its parts by a wide margin, which is pretty terrifying considering most of the parts that make up the album don't even work on their own. 


RATING: 30%


MAMA BASTARD SEZ: "1998 – As a divorced mom of three little boys I discovered new music mostly on the radio. Living in the suburbs of Chicago afforded us the ability to find radio stations with alternative and heavier rock music. It was on one of those stations that the song “Got the Life” caught my attention. I have two types of music that I fall in love with, one is for the lyrics, the other is for the music. Most of the later, I am not even sure of the lyrics. Korn is one of these bands. The first time I heard "Got the Life", I fell in love with the opening bass line and then the way Jonathan Davis sounds like carefully controlled psychosis. Like he is teetering on the edge of a breakdown. Then he moans out some gibberish and BAM the music slaps you in the side of the head and the psychosis breaks free. Perhaps this was reflective of what it was like to raise three boys, who knows, but it spoke to me. Of course, I had to go buy the CD (yes, people bought rather than downloaded music). Then I heard "Freak on a Leash". The heavy bass, with the super twinkly lines over it, then vocally controlled chaos. "Freak on a Leash", in my opinion, has a bridge 2nd only to The Four Horsemen. I was sold, so what better to do than load those little boys into my car and blast the new CD? The first time we heard "Dead Bodies Everywhere", we were pulling into my place of work (a funeral home) and we were all sold on this magical new CD (even the two-year-old was loving it). The theme of controlled chaos pretty much resonates throughout all the tracks, but to this day, I skip all but those three songs, and "All in the Family", which exudes comedic value and is just offensive enough to amuse me. I have not bought a Korn CD since. 18 years later I had my first opportunity to see Korn live in 2016 at the Chicago Open Air festival. The band killed it live. The band was spot on and Jonathan Davis still personified the controlled psychosis. I was surprised at how metal they were live, as I never considered this to be metal before. I love a good pit and although I am too old, too female and too sober to jump in these days, I love to get close enough to be in danger of being shoved in. I broke my foot the day before this show, but it didn’t stop me from wading through the crowd to get close to the action. For the first time in since 1987, I actually had to fight my way out of a crowd. I will blame my bum appendage for that debacle."

Okay, I can actually totally understand the appeal of the "controlled psychosis" thing.  I'll give Korn that, Davis does sound like he's barely holding it together at times.  I pick on the gibberish parts as a dumb gimmick but after reading what my mom wrote here I do understand that bridge in "Freak on a Leash" having that effect.  He just kinda freaks the fuck out but still sounds like he's trying to keep it together.  Trying to decipher that part without cheating, it sounds something like "Boy!  Somethingarbarheenaraha", like he's trying to complete a thought but just goes stark slavering buggo and starts barking like a lunatic.   His abusive childhood is no secret and there's always that one track (I think "Kill You" from Life is Peachy) that just ends in him breaking down and sobbing.  Whether or not it's all just an act to help give the band an easily recognizable and marketable identity is irrelevant I'd say, because it did indeed become something of a trademark of the band.  I still don't like it, but I certainly get that appeal.  I think it's done better by Strapping Young Lad or another album eventually coming up in this series, but it's there.

Also my mom is hardcore as fuck, working at a funeral home as a metal fan and moshing with a broken foot well into her 40s.  Y'all wish you were raised by somebody that fucking cool.

Crossfaith - Apocalyze

I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME

I'm... I'm speechless here.  Really, it's a rare feat to render a narcissist like me catatonic, but... damn.

I suppose I can start with something simple like the history of the band, eh?  Uhh... well, Crossfaith got their start in Osaka around 2006, and have released three albums to date, with this, Apocalyze being the third and most recent, coming out in 2013, and....

Fucking Christ this is such a strangely awfulsome album.

Look, I know nothing at all about this band.  I snagged this album on a whim because I like Japanese metal and that was the extent of my thought process.  I figured I'd be getting a darker Blood Stain Child, based on the "industrial metalcore" tag, since the metal part of metalcore is frequently melodeath anyway.  What I got instead was (and I swear I'm not making this up) a mashup of Disarmonia Mundi, The Browning, Limp Bizkit, modern pop, and dance music with the occasional obnoxious Skrillex-style bass wobble.  It's like some dastardly, Frankensteinian experiment to attract as many swagfag douchetards imaginable by just dominating every possible terrible style of music they might potentially listen to.  Seriously, the fact that Flo Rida doesn't have a guest verse is a mystery to me.

On one hand, it's the worst music I've ever heard, on the other hand, it's really adorably retarded in an almost cute way, not unlike a puppy.  I mean, I give the band credit in the sense that the music is almost never a weird, slapdash, stitched-together hodgepodge of styles, and instead manages to incorporate all of these bizarre influences into one cohesive sound.  There's almost no Winds of Plague style awkward switches in tone (though there are a few, as is almost inevitable with such a mixed pool of influences), which is commendable when working with such a head scratchingly diverse sound.  The breakdowns sound like they belong, the keys don't feel tacked on and superfluous, everything has its place in the machine and every member of the band is properly utilized, which again, is commendable if only for the fact that most weird, genre hopping bands so frequently fuck that up.

But back to that first hand, it's well thought out, but it's still a terrible idea.  You ever listen to a guy rant for hours about how every job interview should involve a test in equestrianism because of all the positive leadership it shows? (No? Just me?) That dude could have researched this for years, done studies, and personally believed the absolute hell out of this, and he could be incredibly well spoken and persuasive, but at the end of the day it's still a goddamn confusing and dumb idea.  That's what Crossfaith embodies to me, a very well articulated argument in favor of a blisteringly stupid idea.

If you can seriously explain to me a scenario where Nu Flames would be greatly improved with a funky Korn riff and an uplifting David Guetta chorus, I'll promptly remove my penis (which is undoubtedly made of lego pieces and shaped like a parrot) and eat it, because clearly we're living in a dream universe.  Despite all these strange examples I'm throwing out there (none of which I'm being facetious about), every song manages to be structured exactly the same, with identical tempos and almost every song length falling in the same twenty second window.  I mean, it's diverse, with some songs being pretty much straight up nu metal ("Hounds of the Apocalypse", "Gala Hala (Burn Down the Floor)"), while others are much more rooted in late era Gothenburg melodeath ("We Are the Future", "Countdown to Hell", "Only the Wise can Control Our Eyes"), while others are basically Linkin Park type pop songs ("Eclipse", "Counting Stars") while all having a huge slathering of dance synths over the top and brostep breakdowns sprinkled throughout, but at the same time it's homogenous, with so many of these clearly different songs with wildly varied influences sounding exactly the same as one another.  I fully expected this to suck once I realized the kind of music I would actually be getting, but man I would have at least expected it to be interesting.  You know, at least in some kind of wacky Mr. Bungle or Big Dumb Face type way, but no, we don't even get that.  We get Blood Stain Child's eccentric little cousin who's less into that weeaboo shit and more into masculine stuff like lifting weights, shutter shades, and lip tattoos.

The fact that there are Skrillex wobble breakdowns, and not one or two, I mean on damn near every single song, is just a complete dead giveaway that this band is manufactured and really and truly is trying to appeal to everybody at once, and in some utterly catastrophic way... it works.  I don't know, this is a really conflicting album for me because it's clearly unspeakably horrawful, but at the same time I could totally see myself putting it on of my own volition once this review is done.  It's so odd, the more I listen, the more I realize that the main influence on this band was probably a mix of Disarmonia Mundi and Linkin Park, two bands I really cannot stand for the life of me, but between the chugging riffs, the string skipping "that melodeath" riff (you know which one I'm talking about), the rap breakdowns, the heavy scratching, chunky bass, guest autotuned female vocals, WUBWUBWUBWUBWU-U-U-U-U-UB and all that, there's some endearing character behind it.  I can't explain why, I readily acknowledge that this is some transcendentally crappy music, but for some reason I just kinda like it.  I like how earnest the band is about their shitty genre blend, I like how well they mix all of these shitty ideas together, I really like some of the straightforward and more stupid riffs (like the main riffs of "Eclipse" or "The Evolution"), I like how aggressive and unabashedly brazen the band is with their one-dimensionality.  I dunno, it's well put together, but it just consists of god awfully wretched components.  Think of something like Turmion Kätilöt as covered by Far East Movement (Forget about those guys already?  Not on my watch!).

So I've done nothing but namedrop terrible bands and describe the music in the most unappealing terms possible from the standpoint of a metal fan, but at the same time I've continually praised the band for some intangible reason that even I can't explain fully.  I think I'm just going to chalk it up to shitty taste and then run back to my HORSE the Band records, but the point stands that there is at least some appeal here.  Keep in mind I listen to Touhou cover albums and think Nightwish is pretty alright, but if you're not a fan of overly sugary synths, incessant dance beats, aggressive melodeath, bouncy rap rhythms, brostep, or uplifting Swedish happy hardcore, you're not going to find anything to like here.  The fact that this band is apparently on Warped Tour this year shows that they're finding their target demographic somewhere, and they have at least some level of crossover exposure here in the States.  It's confusing and I still don't know how this band came to exist or why I find myself humming these melodies so strongly.

It sucks, but it'll get stuck in your head.


RATING - GO FUCK YOURSELF

Artas - The Healing

Jemand hat in meinen Koffer geschissen!

Ever come across one of those albums that you enjoy even though you know it's shit?  Like, you can point out specific reasons why it's terrible, why certain ideas don't work and why they never would have, where the band fails and why, but there's some enduring charm that keeps you hooked despite the obvious, glaring flaws.  We all have a few of those.  I have The Sword's debut, despite its awful drum production and lazy vocals, Arsis's United in Regret despite hilariously feeble themes and slapdash songwriting, and a few others I plan on getting to in the future.  And then there is Artas.  What Arnold Schwarzenegger is to acting, these Austrian dorks are to music .  They're not very good, but god bless them they're trying.  Their failure is in a way, the exact reason they're so entertaining.  Nobody can deliver a hammy one-liner quite like Arnie can, and not many bands can rip off both The Crown and Disturbed in three separate languages in the same song.  Give Arnie a giant machine gun and watch him eat Green Berets for breakfast; give Artas a big, silly breakdown and watch them play it twice as fast as they're supposed to.  Arnold is the king of silly, over-the-top action flicks, something that sucks on a purely cinematic standpoint.  The stories are cliche and dumb and the acting is usually awful, but the violence is ridiculous on Tom and Jerry levels and are packed with so much comedy (intentional and not) that they're just a blast to watch, and you'll never catch me turning down an opportunity to watch The Running Man.  Artas takes two cliched and played out styles (metalcore and nu metal) and throws about four songs too many at you, but mixes in a healthy dose of death/thrash attitude and riffing, polyglot lyrics, and the stupidest shit imaginable played with the most headstrong enthusiasm you're bound to ever hear.

The nu metal influence is a huge turnoff to most, and I'm firmly in the camp that really doesn't like it at all apart from fleeting moments of nostalgia from when I was eleven years old and had a mohawk because I'm a special kind of idiot.  But the way the influences are presented on The Healing are so earnest and blended so confidently with the highly metallic metalcore ala As I Lay Dying and the high speed death/thrash influences like my beloved The Crown (never name your band "The [singular noun]", it makes sentences awkward as fuck) that it never really feels all that out of place.  This was their plan all along, they just dug this style as much as the others and made it work somehow.  "Through Dark Gates" could straight up be a Korn song (unsurprisingly it's the worst track on the album), but much like "AAA" from one of my absolute favorites, Strapping Young Lad's City it's merely one strange quirk that sticks out in the grand scheme of things.  Then there's "Kontrol", which is the otherwise most overtly nu metal influenced track, but the goofy, Turisas-style chorus of "LA LA LA LAAA LA LA LALA LA LA" is such an ohrwurm that I can't stay mad at it, despite the rest of the song sounding like it a b-side to The Sickness.

But strip the nu metal influence away and you're left with a very heavy and thrashy take on metalcore, somewhat akin to what Fedhja did before mercifully splitting up two years ago.  The title track is one of the most obvious examples of what I guess you could call their signature style, if such a thing exists.  It's really and truly an As I Lay Dying styled metalcore song with a strong thrash bent, a catchy chorus, big breakdown, and strange nu metally "BWIP!  BWIP!" vocal flourishes that he spits during transition riffs.  That's what The Healing really is down at its core, it's a bizarre mixture of three or four styles that are all apparently related juuuuust enough to prevent the album from sounding like a hackneyed mess.  I keep using the same couple bands for reference, but that's really what this sounds like.  Take the core elements of The Haunted, The Crown, As I Lay Dying, and Disturbed and put them together, that's Artas.

I can't stress enough how catchy The Healing is, it's stupid but I find myself quietly singing the choruses to "Barbossa", "The Healing", and "I Am Your Judgment Day" under my breath when I think nobody can hear me.  They all feature the same elements I've been gabbing on about, and they're all stupid and fun.  For some, the first word there can really turn some people off, and I don't blame them.  The lyrics are juvenile as hell at times.  Hell, take a look at the few English lines in "Bastardo" (a song entirely sung in Spanish)

Don’t care about the familia
Give a fuck about the policía
Your rules cause diarrhea
My amigos smoke sensimilla

And that's the chorus... Yeah it can be a problem.  If I could speak/read/understand Spanish or German, the other two languages used heavily throughout the album (I'd say it's maybe 40% German, 30% Spanish, 30% English) I'm sure I'd be able to find dozens of other stupid sections.  I mean hell, they cover Coolio's "Gangsta's Paradise".  Just... right there in the middle of the album like it ain't no thang.  And weirdly enough it actually fits, thanks to the ever prevalent nu metal influence.

If this review has turned you off and made you believe The Healing is destined to be awful, then welcome to the club.  I'm amazed I like this at all, it has so many components that are made of nothing but pure failure incarnate, but I can't help but enjoy it for it's starry eyed enthusiasm.  This is a very earnest and well meaning record, despite how silly it can be at times, and that's why I like it.  Artas is a band of youthful exuberance and enthusiastic vibrancy, and it shows here.  I never once doubt for a second that these guys couldn't give less of a shit about their peers or "haters" (man I hate that term) if they tried.  They're doing this because they love it, not because it might make them money.  I feel like there's a pure hearted naivete behind the music, and that's very charming.  Despite the weird choices and juvenile ideas and nu metal influence, I can't help but find The Healing to be rather endearing.  I don't expect most people reading this to like it, but the fact remains that in spite of myself, I do, and I find that it's a lot of fun to spin.  NO SHAME.


RATING - 75%

Five Finger Death Punch - The Way of the Fist

You can't fool a former MTV drone!

I grew up with metal. My mother was a huge Metallica and Pantera fan, my dad loved Black Sabbath, I sang along with Megadeth's Countdown to Extinction from a very young age, and my taste stayed along the lines of hard rock ala GNR and mainstream metal for nearly the first decade of my life. Around the age of nine, I discovered cocai-.... erm... MTV. I was swept up into this mindfuck of a television station and began to base my tastes off of what was popular on the broadcasts. Because of this, I became a massive pop punk fan at nine years old. Blink 182, CIV, The Offspring, and other assorted bands were the order of the day. At age ten, I entered a brief rap phase. Eminem, Dr. Dre, stuff like that. After a few months of that, I "rediscovered" metal through dreck like Korn and Limp Bizkit. They blended that coolness of rap and that heaviness of metal to my ears. Obviously, I know better now, but that was a the coolest shit in the world when I was in fifth grade. I paid money to see Staind live, I thought Slipknot was the heaviest band around, I would listen to System of a Down's Toxicity at least twice a day, I probably still know all the lyrics to every song on Static-X's Wisconsin Death Trip. The lyrics of the genre reflected my twelve year old angst against the society that just didn't understand me, the songs were catchy and occasionally offensive, and it catered to the misunderstood like myself. Somewhere in eighth grade though, I had a strange desire for something a little more complex, so I got sucked into Metallica again and eventually refined myself into the Mosh Jesus you see today.

I shared this story because I learned something from it. Throughout my time as an angsty, Mohecan, nu metal drone, I became extremely familiar with the sound, ideals, and all the nooks and crannies of the genre. It gave me x-ray vision, so to speak... the ability to spot wolves in sheep's clothing. No longer could a bunch of angry losers in Halloween costumes control my mind. This is why Five Finger Death Punch is the recipient of so much of my uncontrollable rage, it's a collection of faux tough guys masquerading as heavy metal, polluting the minds of youngsters seeking to explore the genre. I am being 100% honest when I say that every last one of these songs sound like they would fit perfectly on Slipknot's Iowa. There is honestly nothing redeemable about this release, and all five members of the band, the road crew, those who helped in the studio, and all of their fans deserve to be rounded up, sodomized by cacti, castrated with meat tenderizers, and strangled with their own entrails. This is absolute zero, a place where all life dies. Matter ceases to move and music ceases to be enjoyable in any way.

The songs are only discernible due to differing levels of unintentional hilarity, almost all of which revolve around the hands down biggest clown to ever step behind the mic. Be it the laughable "BREAK THIS SHIT DOWN!", the pathetic "NO MERCY! YOU FAGGOT!", the despicable whining of "Everything I touch, turns to ashes...*crys*", or the sheer stupidity of shouting "YOU'RE MONKEY SEE AND MONKEY DO!" with honest conviction, the album is chock full of comedy around every turn. The breakdown of White Knuckles is pretty much the worst part of the entire record, as it just sums up the entire nu metal angst down to the letter. The crescendo of bullshit with him doing that stupid whisper-and-scream thing of "I'm taking back control... WITH MY KNUCKLES!", it's hilarious and humiliating at the same time. Every last lyric is the absolute nadir of creativity and sounds like shitty poetry hypothetically written by me circa 2001. It's all the same "I'm angry at the world, my father is an asshole, you're a bitch, why did my girlfriend leave me?, why doesn't anybody understand me?" garbage that saturated Korn albums in the late nineties. And honestly, everybody who isn't Devin Townsend should write this down, saying "fuck" every other word does not make you sound tough. The lyrics are not intimidating, I do not fear your obvious rage that you are so desperately trying to convey. Knock it off, it's not cool.

And as if the lyrics weren't enough reason to earn the ire of everybody who's heard an Exodus song in their lifetime, the vocals themselves are some of the most laughably horrendous I've heard since Masterpiece. He has two styles of vocals, Corey Taylor-esque "rawr I'm angry" tough guy screams and Corey Taylor-esque wussburger clean whining, both of which are terrible even for what they are... which is shitty. I've never met anybody who's been dumb enough to throw roadkill over a pile of shit, but this dweeb gets close enough to the general idea by taking an already awful style of vocals and managing to cock them up so badly. If there is any redeemable quality to him, it's that he shuts up every once in a while. The only downfall of the parts where he isn't crying is that he is no longer comically obscuring the pitiful instrumentals. I'll give these guys a very, VERY small amount of credit for at least being able to navigate around their instruments well enough, but that small amount of non-hatred is almost immediately stripped away due to the obnoxiously awful songwriting. They continue the old nu metal tradition of riding one riff into the ground for the duration of the track, with very small breaks for the inevitably terrible chorus and generically crappy breakdown. What could possibly be described as an average riff is extremely few and far between, and whenever it surfaces, it's drowned out by the hormonal stupidity of everybody's favorite microphone mongoloid.

People have tried to argue against my stance by claiming that the presence of double bass drums and guitar solos disqualifies it from being nu metal. This is like saying that calzones taste better if an accordian player is in the room. It has absolutely nothing to do with anything. Slipknot used double bass all the time, so let's not even try playing that card again. These solos that lobotomy patients speak of are as laughable as the rest of the record. Every time a solo starts up, the rest of the band slows down while the guitarist plays a super "emotional" lead consisting of maybe four or five notes, with a couple random rakes to fool all of the 'tards into thinking he's a guitar god. Honestly, listen to any solo on the record and try to imagine what they look like on stage. He hits his first prolonged note, the stage gets dark as all of the members step away from center stage, the lead guitarist slowly walks into the spotlight shining on the now clear center, his head flying back after each bent or held note. In the dark, one can faintly see the arms of the other four idiots rowing up and down, as they all bow on their knees to the six stringed messiah in front of them. He finishes his godlike twelve note solo, gently kisses the rest of the band on the forehead, and gives them permission return to their instruments so they can begin the song again. At this point, I would begin praying to God for Michael Romero to burst through the ceiling and COMPLETELY SHRED HIS FACE OFF! But alas, Romero seems content to sit on his ass and eat pork rinds all day, for if he had even a modicum of a sense of honor, he would've decapitated this blithering fool before this abomination of a record was recorded.

This is Slipknot, nothing more, nothing less. The overabundance of foolish teenage angst immediately shunts any good that could've hypothetically manifested itself through the record. And what's even more hilarious/depressing, is that nothing good is on here anyway. Roadkill over dungpiles, that's all. I believe that if you listen to this, decide it is enjoyable in any way other than unintentionally hilarious, then you need to be drawn and quartered. Listening to this is akin to having your foreskin slowly nibbled away by your grandmother. Death to Five Finger Death Punch. May your souls rot in eternal purgatory. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go blast some Torture Squad to wash the shit out of my ears.

RATING - 0%