SEVEN on SEVEN: Friendly Fire II

SEVEN gatekeep!ers examine one another's trashiest favourites

After our first SEVEN on SEVEN feature a few weeks ago, where we took it in turns to shred (or in one case slather over) each other’s favourite records, we collectively realised that it was time! to race! to the bottom!

This week’s SEVEN sees a gawky cast of pen-pokers take on SEVEN albums nominated for each other’s joy and horror. These SEVEN albums have but three things in common:

1. They are not guilty pleasures.

2. They are nonetheless terrible albums.

3. The nominating writer earnestly enjoys them.

(As you will see, many of these albums have a whole lot more in common than this.)

What makes each record terrible? This is a secret known only to the nominator — as elitism is an enterprise as bottom-feeding as it is top-down, it is the task of each writer to weed out the misgivings that inspired the inclusion of each album and make good on the enjoyment it rightfully fostered. Or, alternatively, to confirm the common sense that led the nominating writer to check themselves and ruthlessly flay them for every scrap of pleasure they ever derived from the record.

SEVEN cookies ready to crumble, the stakes could hardly be any higher. Read on, if you dare:

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Linkin Park - A Thousand Suns (2010)

Submitted by Zack Lorenzen // Parsed by Kerry Renshaw

Art Rock // Alternative Rock

In the almost-decade since Chester Bennington’s suicide, you’d be hard-pressed to find even the grouchiest critic calling Linkin Park insincere. Despite being a firm skeptic myself ever since the atrocious “Burn it Down” was the most overplayed song on American rock radio, my instinct is to take the band in good faith, perhaps even an excess of good faith. Despite their mindboggling commercial success, I can’t find much pleasure in rooting against Linkin Park: surely, middle schoolers full of directionless seethe over their parents’ divorce deserve art that speaks to their experiences in their language, and besides that, they seem like good guys, don’t they? Upstanding, clean-cut boys you could take home to your mom and to your dad (as long as they’re down with the Church of Scientology, I suppose).

Linkin Park’s 2010 album A Thousand Suns in particular begs to be rooted for: who in their right mind wouldn’t want the biggest rock band in the world to take a swing at a sprawling, ambitious anti-war concept album? Well, more’s the pity. The meanest thing I can say about this album is that I find it deeply, insultingly insincere. It revels in cheap Hunger Games cosplay with the unmistakable lazy clumsiness of millionaire dudebros who have absolutely no serious ideological convictions; one imagines Mike Shinoda listing Optimus Prime alongside MLK Jr. and Mario Savio as an inspirational civil rights icon. Its lyrics are nearly to a one indistinguishable from the general-purpose angst of the three albums that preceded it. For a band as incurably unsubtle as Linkin Park, it’s quite conspicuous that their anti-war, anti-nukes concept album fails to use the words “war” or “bomb” so much as one single time (any Minutes to Midnight fans who had gotten their hopes up for a whole album of “Hands Held High”s must have been inconsolable). The instrumentation swaps the buzzy, blunt-force nu metal of their early work for a timid, joyless take on the stomp-clap stadium pop Jeff Bhasker was already well on his way to patenting. I do not hear some thwarted masterpiece that still manages to convey commendable intentions in spite of flawed execution. I hear sloppy hookcraft, song structures that petulantly refuse to develop in any kind of satisfying way, and politics that waver between confused at best and cowardly at worst. I hear a band in creative freefall (Chester is rapping now? Mike is singing in a reggae patois? What the fuck??) using vapid sloganeering to distract from the impending crash.

The little poptimist devil on my shoulder is getting antsy, so here’s my olive branch to the fans, and to poor ol’ Zack Lorenzen in particular: “Waiting for the End” is handily the most beloved song on the album for good reason. When it plays, I can, for a moment, see the vision. Bennington positively soars on the chorus, the squelchy synth lead three minutes in stands out as a unique flourish of production, and the lyrics find a shade of angst that gently invites the apocalyptic subtext that the rest of the album puts much too fine a point on. It offers something both quintessentially Linkin Park in its wallowing self-pity, and genuinely kind of worth rallying behind in its strident plea for a fresh start. Even that Shinoda patois can’t spoil it. And, well, as unimpressive as I find the other songs here (all eight of them; the damn thing is padded to hell for that piddling 47-minute runtime), they hardly plumb the same depths of bootlicking cringe some of LP’s radio-rock contemporaries were sinking to around the same time.

— Kerry Renshaw

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Pharmakon - Bestial Burden (2014)

Submitted by Caleb Yarbrough // Parsed by Zack Lorenzen

Death Industrial

Behind the proverbial kept gates, Caleb prefaced this selection with some hesitance about what constitutes a “guilty pleasure” and wondered if Bestial Burden could truly be considered one in the sense of either word. “Bad album” is an equally controversial assertion: surely a Sacred Bones LP (good label!) bestowed with Best New Music accolades from Pitchfork upon release and wider dissemination via opening for To Be Kind-era Swans would suggest Pharmakon’s mortality-dwelling power electronics have a welcoming critical audience, albeit an intentionally narrow one. As with most things dubiously “industrial,” almost all of the album’s tracks settle into hypnotic grooves more concerned with carving out a nightmarish stasis than subjugating listeners to whiplash or shrill frequencies, but even at a concise 30-odd minutes, Margaret Chardiet’s yelping and moaning can be a hard sell.

Thankfully, though, we write (and you read) blog posts on gatekeep music dot com—there is no “Billboard or bust” pissant to traumatize around these parts. Furthermore, Chardiet’s whole oeuvre is tailor-made for grim reminders that our bodies are lumps of flesh and bone whose vital functions are doomed to deteriorate. Her fascination with how quickly and inevitably organs can fail stems in part from an emergency operation that left her temporarily bedridden and unable to perform, sharing a hospital room with a terminally ill stranger. Not even an overbearing Sonny & Cher cover can cast that experience in a positive light, not that I blame her for leaning into some cognitive dissonance—it’s a good bit more enticing than the track where she sends the pseudodysphagiacs among us running for the hills, and the remainder of this LP doesn’t land with any particular profundity despite the context preceding it.

So back to Caleb: my gut tells me that for this album to really resonate, he must have found it at an ideal time, perhaps during a similar health scare, some experience where he could find solace and kinship in this project’s abstract, abrasive reckoning with involuntary immuno-sabotage. I cherish some albums and artists for those same reasons and don’t feel particularly compelled to police the lengths to which an artist or a listener might go in pursuit of existential misery-maxxing. That said, I can’t ignore the nagging afterthought: is Caleb fond of Bestial Burden because anything short of vicarious admiration feels insensitive to the life-derailing Hell that Chardiet had to overcome? If so, I get the impulse, but step up your snob game, rookie; an austere album terrified of death can’t possibly represent the pinnacle of embarrassment in your music library. If anything, the opposite should be true—there are, in fact, some albums so taxing and tacky and culturally pervasive that if for no other reason than the risk of hearing them in passing ever again, they might make you fear the prospect of staying alive. Bestial Burden is too short, too ~artistic~, too easy to avoid to register as a daunting, apology-required classic. Good news, though: Milo is about to push your understandings of these descriptors to new extremes, and like Sisyphus’ infamous boulder, not even your wiliest efforts can stop its looming presence from rollin’.

— Zack Lorenzen

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Limp Bizkit - Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water (2000)

Submitted by Milo Ruggles // Parsed by Caleb Yarbrough

Nu-Metal

I somehow managed to go an entire nu-metal-obsessed adolescence without knowingly hearing any Limp Bizkit, so I went into Chocolate Starfish about as cold as it gets. Having now listened to all 74 insufferable, puerile, and derivative minutes twice, I consider myself incredibly lucky to have been spared whatever severe cognitive scarring Fred Durst inflicted on young Milo that has kept his hooks sunk into now-adult brain tissue. Young Milo wasn’t emotionally mature enough to resist the pull of Durst’s impotent, squealing faux-macho posturing, hadn’t yet developed a view of women that grants them an internal life and so wasn’t bothered that Durst hadn’t either, and either wasn’t aware or didn’t yet have the critical discernment necessary to care how pale an imitation Limp Bizkit was of preceding acts like Rage Against the Machine, Tool, and Nine Inch Nails. Perhaps we can transfer some of young Milo’s innocent victimhood to current Milo, but anyone for whom Bark Psychosis’ Hex is an all-time favorite should have the necessary taste and depth to know better.

The nerve Durst had to include claims about Limp Bizkit’s originality in their infuriating, brain-cell-evaporating “Outro” is astounding. The ideas put to record on Chocolate Starfish are either wholly unoriginal, embarrassing, or (most commonly) both. The lyrics are absolutely riddled with clichés and shallow impotence. How Milo can enjoy listening to Durst unashamedly lean on lines like “check yourself before you wreck yourself” and “it’s my way or the highway” as lyrical hooks without vomiting is beyond my comprehension. There is some variance in the vocal delivery, but only in the form of a rotating set of blatant impressions of famous alternative metal vocalists, occasional dips into godawful, flaccid alternative rock crooning, and, of course, the least compelling rapping you’ve ever heard.

Things aren’t quite so grim on the instrumental front, even if nothing there was remotely new in the year 2000. While the distorted guitar sections are generally duller than they are heavy, there are a few reasonably effective twinkly-clean guitar lines on “The One”, “It’ll Be OK”, and “Hold On.” While the choruses are almost all awful, there are a couple of decent bridges on “Livin’ It Up” and “Take A Look Around”. “It’ll Be OK” is probably my favorite track on the album; I like the lead clean guitar melodies, the lyrics are relatively non-toxic (excepting “just wanna kill myself for you”), even positive towards the end, and the way the bridge ramps up the distortion on its guitar line in the passage before the final chorus is... Neat. Cool. Fine. I’ll give Milo the benefit of the doubt and assume agreement that the most popular singles on this thing are not the highlights. “Rollin’” is the platonic ideal of lowbrow trash, and “Take A Look Around”’s repetitive attempts at social commentary are the most facile and empty that I’ve semi-willingly subjected myself to in a decade.

So, Milo, Mr. Ruggles, it’s not too late to stop limpin’ with the bizkit, man. Get some help. Or, an alternative approach: every time you find yourself with the inexplicable impulse to listen to this album, listen to “Outro” first. While a two-minute loop of the most rage-inducing laugh ever recorded inflicts itself on your eardrums, ask yourself if you might be better off limpin’ with literally anyone or anything else instead.

— Caleb Yarbrough

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Avenged Sevenfold - Avenged Sevenfold (2000)

Submitted by A.R.O. // Parsed by Milo Ruggles

Alternative Metal

In a perfect world, Avenged Sevenfold wouldn’t exist, and the most embarrassing moments of your life would be forgotten in favour of your best qualities and intentions. In the real world, your indiscretions are remembered not only by those who bore the misfortune of sharing their teenage years with you, but also by the adults who did their best to guide you toward something constructive and worthwhile, such as ornithology or unpaid art criticism, while trying to subtly prevent you from walking towards a future in which you let yourself be defined by frivolous and publicly deplorable traits like being a furry or an Avenged Sevenfold fan.

Unluckily for the childhood posse that Avenged Sevenfold is comprised of, they can’t blame teenage angst and ignorance for what unfolded on their fourth LP, unless they admitted to the arrested development that one might infer upon them given they’d been paid the big bucks to explore their well-worn pathologies using their music and squandered the opportunity by pursuing melodic metalcore and getting hella tattoos instead of reading a book or two and thinking about their place in the world.

There might be a charm to Avenged Sevenfold's dextrous simplicity; there also might not. I'd love to give them the benefit of the doubt and assume that when they use the lyric "Doc, I'm dying" to commence an ode to golden doses in the throes of terminal illness that they're being purposefully hilarious, but they really perform and write across the track as if this is an issue near and dear to them, which it might well be, but the bounds of good taste have been bounded over by this time. One has contrary hopes for "A Little Piece of Heaven", a supposed Mr. Bungle tribute in the shape of a Rape and Revenge narrative about a necrophiliac and his victim who make unlikely amends as an undead serial-killing duo, but then lyrics like "I can keep you looking young and preserved forever / with a fountain to spray on your youth whenever" roll on out and you realise that creativity has also been murdered and defiled and there is no hope whatsoever.

Then there's the more obvious missteps: two Support Our Troops cock rock anthems preceding a late-game anti-war track; a straight-and-trite country tune to end the album that just won't fucking end because shredding > songwriting; and the corpse-fucking track being the finale in a trio of romantic songs that, in achronological order, otherwise comprise of a plain old story about murder as sex, and a document of a cycle of subtle abuse that just keeps recurring. Sexy! Almost as sexy as continuing the proud rockist tradition of wearing make-up and painting your nails in order to obfuscate a plain-old mindset of chauvinism. It's like if Led Zep were less groundbreakingly good, Guns [']N' Roses grew up on first-wave metalcore, or we had to deal with Motley Crue existing for a second time.

What does this say about A.R.O.? For starters, I feel — for reasons I can’t quite put my finger on — that A.R.O. was one of the allegedly multiple people to put A Thousand Suns forth for this piece, and was too busy picking pimples and practicing sweep picking to get first dibs on that shocker of an album. Additionally, I can’t help but see Avenged Sevenfold‘s ambitions to respect its shredhero origins, be the band’s Black Album foray into midtempo pop-influenced crowd-movers, and wear a battlejacket’s inscrutable hodgepodge of influences all at once to be a reflection of A.R.O.’s unbreakable and enviable optimism, both strength and weakness; a willingness to accept that anything might be great, but a reticence to step forth and truly claim anything for itself, even if it were just a simple bout of teenage angst experienced at the age of 26.

— Milo Ruggles

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The Used - Vulnerable (2012)

Submitted by Hugh Puddles // Parsed by A.R.O.

Pop Rock // Emo Pop

Oh dear lord. As someone generally predisposed against the entire pop-punk genre umbrella (and someone once dragged to Warped Tour by an ex), this pushed all sorts of buttons for me. I will say, having no prior experience with this band, I enjoyed its bombast compared to its peers—this didn’t feel like four dudes content to write the same song over and over again. Yes, questionable sounds and weird production choices run amok, chief among them might be whatever the fuck they were doing (??) with the vox on the verses of “Hands and Faces.” And though I applaud its Broadway-esque ambitions, very rarely did they compellingly mesh with the songwriting (“This Fire” being a fun exception). Often it feels like they finished a song and would say “How can we make this sound more fucky?”

In that way, I’m not surprised at all that this is Hugh’s choice, even if the majority of its runtime is considerably more white bread than many of his current leanings. I can excuse it as what I can only assume was an early gateway toward the wonkier music he’s into now. I found myself nodding my head more often than I’d like to admit, but I couldn’t recommend this to anyone who isn’t already well-indoctrinated by “Scene”-adjacent music. I can’t say I hate it, and I honestly don’t even dislike it much (aside from some especially ill-formed latter tracks), but this album absolutely screams “You had to be there.”

— A.R.O.

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Overkill - The Killing Kind (1996)

Submitted by Zach Lucia // Parsed by Hugh Puddles

Thrash Metal

As I understand it, Overkill’s sell lies in their stubborn authenticity: they played thrash metal before it was cool (forming one whole year before any of the Big Four), and continued playing it long after it was cool. As someone emphatically uninterested in thrash and even more so in mid-late ‘90s metals that stole its commercial traction, this earns a begrudging thumbs up for continuity — and would you believe it, The Killing Kind sounds every bit like a thrash band sputtering on through a hostile decade because, hey, they’re a band and thrash is what they do. They evince their veteran credentials with chugs-per-minute riffage where it counts, but it’s rare that I feel any fire from this. The bulk of this record is so dialled-in and procedural that it’s hard to formulate a particularly strong attitude of like/dislike around it.

Most of the time, I was just a little bored (most of all on the low-stakes slog of an instrumental “Feeding Frenzy”). This record is too half-hearted to be provocative! Even the occasional high-pitched banshee vocals seemed shy of the spotlight, and if the occasional nu-metal ugga-bugga attack elicits a raised eyebrow, it ain’t enough to tip the scales. It’s one thing suffering through a whole album of that bollocks ((hed) p.e.’s 1997 debut comes to mind immediately), but on a tracklist this shy of sauce, a little comic relief goes a long way. By the time “The Cleansing” blunders into whatever quasi-liturgical refrain the band decided to stick on the end for Epic Art points, I made my peace that this was as much entertainment as I could reasonably ask for; when the following “The Mourning After/Private Bleeding” dropped a prime stinker of a Sabbath - “Changes”-esque ballad, I felt positively spoiled.

So where does that leave you, dear Zach? Is this really as low as you can go? You fancy that you’ve moved on from (goddammit) butt metal to the point that this stale offering from a B-stream legacy act is the worst thing we can accuse you of enjoying, still, actually? Knowing you as I do, I don’t buy it — is this really that much more stale or offensive than, say, late-career Daughters (without even starting on the platform issues at play there)? Is this any less distasteful than the collaborative piano playlist we heard recently where an offering from your good self kicked off a tribute to that most noble of instruments with the motherfucking plin-plin-plon from Gwyn’s theme in Dark Souls? You have almost certainly enjoyed Autechre albums that make poor Overkill look like Pig Destroyer-level entertainment. Be kinder to your past loves! And be crueller to your present self!

— Hugh Puddles

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Neon Tres - Habits (2010)

Submitted by Kerry Renshaw // Parsed by Zach Lucia

Pop Rock // New Wave

After two remarkably inoffensive songs, I began to wonder what the deal really was for Kerry Renshaw’s submission to SEVEN on SEVEN. Sure, Neon Trees Habits sits squarely in the territory of middling aughts rawk—tenderly annoying like an ex who randomly texts manipulative niceties, bombastic with all the subtlety of freshman theater major, and pretty catchy at times. You know the tropes, but it had hardly offended me until “Animal” started. Suddenly I knew there was something sinister about it because (1) I’d heard this song before, (2) I already knew that I really dislike it, and (3) I could have sworn it was a 30 Seconds to Mars song.

Upon realizing these disturbing facts I quickly scuttled off to youtube. I clocked where the worm turned exactly when lead vocalist Tyler Glenn walked into frame with his ungelled mohawk draped like a hipster hitler-stache over his forehead. The lead vocalist is the staple figure of rock music: from Iggy Pop and Jello Biafra to Kurt Cobain and Chester Bennington, rock music’s emotional core is expressed and expanded by the lead. The surrounding music might matter if you’re a nerd, but such debates are superfluous to the rather obvious fact that a charismatic, emotionally resonant lead singer is often at the center of rock music’s pop appeal and adjacency.* Lead vocalists are also largely era dependent. How annoyed one is by the flourishes and details of any era is generally subjective, but I for one find few lead types more annoying than the faux-ironic over-it-all yet deeply, profoundly emotionally sensitive type. These layers tend to only be half drawn curtains over an absurd ego. Jared Leto is one of the more despicable figures in popular culture, and particularly music, but he is not an isolated creature. The milieu of pop aughts-rawk is teeming with these figures: a wide swath of men whose primary appeal is they look like Axl Rose when he’s off his SSRIs.

With this newfound knowledge, the remainder of Habits unfolded before me. Not like anything in particular though, it’s quite mediocre and the music itself inspires little more than the occasional premonition of gray. I could talk about the hacky “oh-oh-ohs” or how tepid and lifeless everything feels, but really, the stain is Jared Leto. I can’t get past the kind of dude who makes music like this. Is it wrong of me to think about what it’s like to watch Tyler Gleen’s sawft-hawk sway while he’s on top? What if he’s watching himself in the mirror? Such thoughts rarely come to my head unless I am listening to music that sounds like 30 Seconds To Mars.** I shudder to think that their appeal is romantastic.

*Another time: Death Metal Against Pop: How Harsh Vocals Purposefully Gatekeep Metal. Other fun ideas: How Guitar Players with Wide Receiver Brain Created Death Metal, and: Pop History: The Gender Politics and Dynamics of Mid-Aughts Emo and Metalcore.

**Oh wait no they sound like The Killers. Dammit.

— Zach Lucia

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That is all! Let us know who got the fairest/meanest hearings in the comments below, along with who YOUR nomination would have been!

SEVEN will return next week, and in weeks to come beyond that!