Skinlab
Nerve Damage
7.5
It’s not really a knock, I guess, but I have managed to spend the entire career of Skinlab to this point without hearing them. I might run across a used CD in my friend’s shop and ask him about them, and he would assure me I would be bored out of my mind by them. That they were just an amalgam of other bands I was not altogether fond of - White Zombie, Monster Magnet, Godsmack… So I would put the disc back down and move on to something more interesting.
So it’s ironic that, having passed the band’s CDs up so many times I would end up having to review their … whatever…greatest hits? Anthology? B-sides? None of this shit means anything anymore. I actually hear bands who have “hits” - whether I want to or not - so this is not that. B-sides and hard to finds in the age of the internet are thinly veiled ego trips. This seems to be more of a way to introduce this band to people like me, I guess. But there is a reason we didn’t want to hear Skinlab in the first place. It’s not like we couldn’t.
To wit: the album is unnecessary. Useless. Needless. Time and space wasting nonsense. There is simply no reason to own this CD unless you are so utterly devoted to mediocre clones of mediocre bands that you can’t pass up a deal like this.
Which is not to say that track by track you won’t find some very good songs. But the ratio of good to boring is so low as to make the whole effort more painful than it’s worth. Some of the tracks that made me pay attention were “Paleface”, a nice little plodding behemoth of a tune, where the singer’s Rob Zombie style monotone kind of works. And “Raza Odiada” delivers some decent revved up and messy chunk. But songs like the Smashing Pumpkin’s cover, “Bullet with Butterfly Wings” are so god awful they actually make me wish I was listening to Smashing Pumpkins. That is bad. And the all acoustic “Purify” is just human waste recorded. The live tracks make you wonder why these guys garnered enough of a following to last a decade.
Bottom line: I think even serious Skinlab freaks… if there are any… would be much happier with the original songs from the original records. If you are not a serious Skinlab freak, I cannot see how this retrospective will bring you on board. And if you are one of the people who just never found any impetus to listen to Skinlab in the first place…Wisdom is on your side.
Related
SkinlabThe Scars Between Us
9/15/2009