Strapping Young Lad - The New Black (2006)
It took me a bit to even muster up the energy to write this. Before I embarked on this epic writing journey, I wiped my unborn children off of my hand, I showered, I consoled my mother that I'd be back one day, and I began to tippity tappity clickity clack away. Take basically everything that you wouldn't want to hear on a Strapping Young Lad album (short of hip-hop beats/rapping) and it'll come together as "The New Black", an album so half-assed that it's actually kind of astounding in its own way, what with how the songs generally lack any form of cohesiveness or even brutality, you'd almost swear that you had gotten a copy of your jackass roommate's weird brother's band's "let's get together and knock out some tunes, yeah?" album instead of the band that brought you "City" and "Alien". This album, despite what the title may lead you to believe, is not really a Strapping Young Lad album TO ME, but rather just Devin Townsend gathering the boys around for one more outing, saying "fuck writing any material, why don't we work on these demos that I trashed before?" and jumping into the fray with reckless abandon.
You may be thinking "nah, the band that made "City" can't make -that- bad of an album" to yourself, but lo and behold, they certain fuckin' did. The anger is mostly gone and replaced by "Metalocalypse"-tier humor or even just heavier rock-y tunes. Devin Townsend sings on this album much more than he did on the others, there isn't as much chugging on the guitars, and there's experimentation but it just feels so fucking corny. If you listen to "Antiproduct" you may be thinking "this is decent enough" until it gets to a part where Devin Townsend has all of these horns and flutes come in, and you're thinking "what the fuck" as it becomes apparent that the band just doesn't give a fuck anymore. If that isn't evidence enough, then just pop on over to "Fucker", and although it might be a little catchy, remind yourself that this is a band with a well-respected legacy that has pumped out some great material over the years. The fact that literally the only song from this album that I can walk away from even mildly liking is "You Suck" is just fuckin' awful.
When you get down to the core of the album, it sounds like the band has no idea what made people like them before. There's nothing here that really grabbed me at all: Just half-assed musical ideas stretched out into entire songs by a band that wasn't angry anymore and probably just had to shit out one more studio album to get out of a contract, and unfortunately enough, as of writing, this was their last studio album, and that makes it so Strapping Young Lad doesn't go out with a bang, a whimper, or even a whisper, but a fart. As far as I'm concerned, Strapping Young Lad was dead before this album, and the record company managed to fry up pieces of its corpse to sell in one last effort to get consumers to eat from the decaying cadaver once known as the band that made so many great songs such as "In the Rainy Season", "Love?" and "Detox", not the band that made "The New Black", because fuck that band.
4/10
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Feel free to check out the song previews/buy this album using my Amazon Associate link!
