Review Summary: Half irresistible clichés, half boring progression, one hundred percent average.
Oh yes,
Infest by Papa Roach. This is one of those records people of a certain generation – or, if you will, a certain age gap – will have a hard time badmouthing. Much like
Sesame Street or the Harry Potter books, it caught them at a stage in their development where it had a huge impact in their lives, and will forever be linked to a certain couple of years and the events that took place there. As such, people in their early to mid-twenties tend to look at this album with rose-tinted glasses, making it out to be better than it really is.
Well, folks, it is time to remove the nostalgia goggles once and for all. As much as this album impacted your adolescence – and mine – from the viewpoint of a decade later, it is definitely and undeniably poor. Those songs we all remember, and loved so much, are riddled with clichés and traits which, from an adult perspective, are nothing short of laughable. The rest of the songs – those we didn’t really care about – are actually considerably better, but lack both the choruses and the songwriting skills to capture our interest the way those early ones do.
But let’s start at the beginning, the portion of the album everyone remembers and which contains Papa Roach’s biggest hits,
Last Resort and
Broken Home. For most of us, back in 2000, this was the coolest thing this side of Limp Bizkit; in 2010, however, the songs sound absolutely ridiculous, immature as hell, and laden with all the traits which made nu-metal such a reviled genre to begin with. Indeed, these first few tracks are a veritable smorgasbord of white-boy rapping, faux-tortured screaming, and “angsty” lyrics which smack of corporate savvy. The only salvageable part is the bass playing, and even that only really shines on a couple of moments, like
Blood Brothers and parts of
Between Angels And Insects.
But if these songs are so bad, why are they also so irresistible? In fact, there are a few songs on this “side” of the album to which I can still recite the full lyrics – and I hadn’t heard them in a while prior to this review! Additionally, these tracks take me back to when I was 15, and while this was far from a stellar period of my life, I can still relate to the feelings I had when I popped these songs in.
However, this is no excuse to let the cheesy songwriting and teen-baiting clichés off the hook. Everything we thought was so cool back then (the sudden speed-up with matching shrieks on
Broken Home, the profanity-laden alternate chorus on
Between Angels And Insects) is revealed to be nothing but a collection of tacky tricks whose sole intention is precisely to appeal to the target demographic. Here and there there is a shred of a good song –
Between Angels And Insects shows some progression – but overall, the only song that really remains recommendable nowadays is the irresistible
Dead Cell.
The second half of the album is a different story altogether. Back then, I didn’t really care about anything past the sixth song, making all the others to be mere re-hashes of opener
Infest, and exceedingly boring ones to boot. A closer evaluation proves I was wrong, but not entirely. Unlike what I thought, these songs are
not repetitive clones of each other, instead presenting much more variation and better ideas than the first half; however, they are undeniably and irrevocably
boring. Suffice it to say, unless I am listening to them, I cannot remember a single thing from any of these songs, apart from the reggae-tinged bonus-track and the fact that
Blood Brothers is probably the best thing on there. Still, this is where most of the songwriting progression can be found, with nifty details and shreds of good ideas pervading the songs (the snaking guitar lead on
Revenge, the straight-up radio rock of the last two tracks). Ultimately, however, the songs lack the choruses or the songwriting power to really make us want to come back, not to mention they incur in some of the same flaws of the first half, notably the dreadful rapping and the lyrics.
In fact, lyrics are a huge problem for Papa Roach, at least on this album. Stereotypical “tortured” messages and paradoxical faux-thug posturing abound, with the best/worst example being found on the laughably horrendous
Snakes. Not-so-hidden track
Tightrope proves Papa Roach can not only write a more mature song, but also decent lyrics; however, the band botch it by including a blatant syntactical mistake on the very first line of the song. Enunciating
”my words are weapons in which I murder you with” is
NOT the best way to endear adults to your music; on the contrary, it’s bound to just make them as pissed-off as it has made me.
So in conclusion, there is nothing on this album for a mature person to enjoy. The half we know and loved is nothing but tired and frankly laughable clichés; the other half is nothing but boring progression suffering from an utter lack of choruses. The final result is exactly the sort of album people love in their teens, then scoff and laugh at the minute they hit college. As for Papa Roach, they would destroy their credibility and be outed as the posers they were with the next album, which saw them revamp their style completely and radically to fit in with the changing trends. Their career has been downhill since then, but listening to
Infest in 2010 and at age 24 begs the question: has it ever been on the hill in the first place?
Recommended Tracks
Broken Home
Dead Cell
Blood Brothers
