Review Summary: blah blah blah blah blah haha sweat sweat sweat sweat
Prior to
Ego Trip’s release, I hadn’t heard any of its many teaser tracks. This is not a flex: it wasn’t exactly
hard to avoid new Papa Roach material. Call it prejudice, call it having listened to every goddamn record this garbage band has ever put out: I wasn’t expecting this album to be anything close to good or interesting. Much more interesting were the reviews that dropped in the week leading up to
Ego Trip. Ranging from positive to extremely positive, one piece mentions that “Papa Roach has made a powerful career of defying expectations and joyfully flaunting their genre fluidity”. Another reviewer states that the record is “packed with edgy alt-rock guitars”, contains “banging tunes” and, most importantly, “[Papa Roach are] always a top-quality live band, every single track on
Ego Trip that won’t absolutely rip live”.
Mind you, I am not trying to criticise words written by preteens as much as I intend to point out that it is at the very least
interesting that the only pre-release reviews stem from websites with titles in the vein of epicrockbro.com (or: websites even less relevant than the one you’re currently on). Anyway, fast forward a week,
Ego Trip is available on streaming services. Joy! Unsurprisingly, this thing is an absolute train wreck. Opener ‘Kill The Noise’ solely exists to reaffirm listeners that Papa Roach still
got the heavy, yo. I’m not pulling this out of thin air: the YouTube description of the music video reads “This track is probably our hardest rocking new song in 4 years!”. They’re not wrong, but that doesn’t mean it’s good: a mind-numbingly simple riff and the chorus shamelessly copying Bring Me The Horizon’s ‘Teardrops’ do all the
heavy lifting to make the song completely redundant. Yet, ‘Kill The Noise’ is easily one of the record’s highlights purely due to its, eh, listenability. The same cannot be said for the more hip hop-infused numbers such as ‘Stand Up’, ‘Bloodline’ and ‘Liar’. Incredibly flaccid songwriting, painfully overblown production, a lack of memorable melodies: it’s all there! I truly cannot be bothered writing more about this particular side of
Ego Trip, so here are some lyrics from ‘Stand Up’:
Watch out, watch out, they takin’ notes now
Watch out, they tryna divide us, but all I hear is
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, haha
Sweat, sweat, sweat, sweat
Stand up, stand up, stand up,
Sweat, sweat, sweat, sweat,
Stand up, stand up, stand up
Jacoby Shaddix is 45 years old. Anyway, besides the band’s usual rap-centric disasters,
Ego Trip also presents some delightful takes on pop punk. ‘Always Wandering’ marries Simple Plan-isms with hard rock in a fashion that has never been in fashion for good reason. Other angst-ridden lowlights include the MGK-esque ‘Unglued’, the ridiculously generic ‘No Apologies’ somehow functioning as a surprisingly decent display of Shaddix’ vocal competence, and ‘Dying To Believe’, a song I refuse to waste any words on. Hell, there’s even an
emotional acoustic ballad in the form of ‘Leave a Light On’ which is definitely emotional and acoustic, but falls flat due to its focus on incredibly tired lyrical cliches: “
The rain comes following an endless drought / To wash away the remnants of all your doubt” (side note: ‘remnants’ is pronounced as ‘remmennants’ because I guess Jacoby needed an extra syllable to make the lyric work. songwriting!!!).
This record comprises fourteen tracks, yet manages to be nothing more than a bad concoction of bad pop punk, bad rap rock, bad lyrics, and vaguely competent performances.
Ego Trip is a thing that exists now. What you do with that information will probably tell you a lot about your (mental) age.
