Review Summary: The latest 'supergroup' project featuring members from Mudvayne, Nothingface, and Pantera's own Vinnie Paul. A great idea that gets lost just as quick as it was found.
Its the sad experience most of us have had before. You hear about a 'highly-anticipated' album in your genre of music and you go on your mission to buy it and be the first of your friends to indulge in the beautiful noise. You run out to Best Buy or wherever, pick up the CD, tear of the wrapping and throw it in your car CD player; and somewhere on the way between the CD store and your house, you come to the sad realization that you would have had more pleasure taking that $15 dollars and buying an 18-pack of nattie light than if you had spent it on the CD.
This is the kind of experience I had when purchasing Hellyeah.
For the unacquainted, Hellyeah is the 'metal supergroup' comprised of Pantera/Damageplan's drummer: THE Vinnie Paul, Mudvayne's Chad Gray and Greg Tribbet, and those two dudes from Nothingface. The members from Nothingface contribute their talents on bass and guitar, but if you didn't look at the album cover, you wouldn't even notice they were there. I digress.
So taking these rock and metal giants and putting them in a group is a wonderful idea on paper, but the end product is, sadly, nothing more than another mediocre entrance into the world of hard rock.
The album starts of well enough with the song "Hellyeah" and even if it is just a retread of the ground set by Mudvayne's own song "Determined," it kicks things off nicely with Vinnie Paul's drums leading the way. Even the lyrics, though cliche' make you want to get up and give the finger to the world. Actually, the best part of the song is when you put it on your Ipod, the song shows up as -- song: Hellyeah, band: Hellyeah, album:Hellyeah-- Though if that's the most enjoyment you're going to get out of the album, that speaks volumes about the quality of the music.
The next song, and also the single, is the absolutely atrocious "You Wouldn't Know." I have listened to this song about 5 times, trying desperately to find something to enjoy about it, but all I hear are guitar lines that sound uninspired and quite frankly, boring. Going along with this is probably one of the worst vocal performances I've heard from Chad Gray.
After this song, the album never quite recovers. The majority of the songs are listenable, but absolutely every one of them sound like echoes of better songs we've all heard, especially from the individual bands incorporated into Hellyeah. "Waging War" rocks pretty hard, but the lyrics and song structure ruin it as Chad screams in agony as he complains about how writers, "use me to sell your f---ing magazines" and ends up just sounding like a 12 year old who just found out that there are people in the world who will get the gain out of your pain. Oh well, tough, you're in a band called Hellyeah, shut up and rock. Anyways. Another half-way decent rocker, "Goddamn" picks things up a little, but again, the structure of the song is average, the guitars are playing down-tuned boring crap, and Vinnie Paul's drumming is no longer distinguishable from any other drummer on the metal scene.
There are ballads on the album as well including "Thank You" and "Alcohaulin' Ass." "Thank You" suffers from the fact that Chad Gray simply cannot do his growl/singing in a ballad type of song, but it was nice to hear a guitar solo that sounded like it had a place in the song. "Alcohaulin' Ass" didn't do anything more than make me wonder why Epic Records even bothered putting a Parental Advisory sticker on the album. They would have been better off putting a warning label for all ages.
In the end, Hellyeah is simply a good idea that suffered from being rushed onto the market and would have been much better off being a private show (B-Sides, anyone?) or in the garage. Chad's vocals are lacking severely, especially when compared to his earlier work. The guitars are fluttering and redundant and, as sad as it is to say this, Vinnie Paul just isn't himself on this album. If these guys had been given more time with their music and maybe dropped the "I'm a badass" attitude, this album could have been infinitely better. What we're left with, is a failed supergroup project that makes a supergroup like Audioslave sound like the most creative vibration to ever smack your ear drum.
So... is this album worth your hard-earned cash even when you're a big fan of Pantera and/or Mudvayne?
HellNo
