Metalcatto
Today, we’re going to try to answer the question: Can a metal album be ruined entirely by its lyrics? Also, I know many of you voted for Unatoned, but this is significantly worse. Machine Head‘s Catharsis was clearly a product of its time, full of excesses and moments that feel like an old Facebook post from someone trying really hard to virtue-signal. Having said that, the music itself didn’t make me puke right away. But don’t worry, stay with me.
Imagine The Blackening, but you take everything that made it interesting and emotionally intense, leaving behind random riffs and macho tough-guy lyrics. We do have some poetry to share with you: “I’m eatin’ pussy by a dumpster,” “Beard stinking like snatch,” “Glass-dick,” “Get your middle fingers in the air,” and “Women are the reason why men go broke.” Not their wokest moment. Breathtaking, right? Not even Louise Glück or Arthur Rimbaud could come up with such razor-sharp prose.
Yet I don’t think the instrumentation sucks in any particular way. It just sounds like Machine Head without the spark of their previous work, which is tragic because the band had been on a decent run before Catharsis. If anything, the music isn’t bad; it’s just unremarkable. Having to put up with it for more than 70 minutes, however, is a crime against humanity. We could toss out half the album and at least get a 2.5/5.0 on my scale. But no, why would we compress our egos into 45 minutes? That’s low self-esteem.
Now, let’s talk about the social and political commentary. It takes something special to make both the right and the left cringe so hard. There’s nothing here but edgy anger, and if anything, it’s misplaced. A little more reading—let’s say, the Frankfurt School (whose thinkers I consider a bunch of petulant souls, but still, some reading would help)—might have given this album a bit more depth, even if I disagreed with its overall posture.
Perhaps the most entertaining and hilarious moments come when Robb Flynn seems to be berating California at such a pace that I wonder why we didn’t get a hip-hop track instead. Some of these analogies would be fire in the West Coast scene. I’d never listened to Catharsis before, and although I think the hate is a little out of proportion and clearly a byproduct of our polarized times, it’s still garbage on a hot summer day.
Now that we’ve tried to answer one question, I’ll leave you with another: Is this Machine Head‘s worst album? Or is it Supercharger, the one that got them fired? Or perhaps Unatoned, the one you guys voted for me to review, which we’ll probably get to later. What I do know is that the days of Burn My Eyes are long gone. They’re never coming back.
Brace yourselves!
