Review Summary: The Red Herring Occurrence.
Misdirects in rock music aren't exactly new, with Foo Fighters, Green Day et al often distracting fans from albums worth of soppy bilge by releasing one hard-hitting lead single in the lead up to album release that accumulates so much hype as to garner the 'return to form' tag. For The Vines, "Metal Zone" is that song. An under 3-minute attack of filthy metallic guitar and screeching energetic pomp filtered through an abominably hook-ridden chorus, it leads music fans at large to believe
Wicked Nature may be something special. Now readers, here's the biggest surprise of 2014: it isn't.
Across 22 songs and 50+ minutes of tiresome post-grunge and acoustic pop better suited for kindling, Craig Nichols manages to make an unreasonably expansive double album that he really doesn't have the standing to do. Besides completely dropping off the radar after
Highly Evolved and only reappearing for false-alarm 'returns' and Nichol's unfortunate autism diagnosis, the band aren't exactly a household name, leaving much of
Wicked Nature to irrelevance, void of any polemic that may actually cause people to be interested in The Vines. Instead, what you get is one disc filled to the brim with fairly average and functional rock songs, and another of utterly uninteresting ballads. Some tracks on disc 1 such as "Psychomatic" and "Venus Fly Trap" prove they may still have a way with hooks echoing "Get Free" and "Ride", but it's the dredge through disc 2 that ultimately has you losing faith in The Vines as a musical outfit. Indeed, the music video to "Get Free" of furious punks killed by lightning in the stormy dessert seems a far cry from the wholly disengaging "Funny Thing" and the 11 sullen and dreary numbers that preceded it. Undoubtedly, this record absolutely smacks of its self-professed 17-day creation process.
What exactly Nichols is trying to achieve isn't clear, instead playing a game of pretending desperately to be relevant. There comes a time when all has-beens realize their time has come and to move on. For Craig Nichols and his Griswolds misfits, it translates into a 37-year old desperately holding onto a dream 10-years dead.
