Review Summary: Please cleanse my ears
Riddle me this: who asked for a new Buckcherry album in 2019？
Of all the 2000s radio rock bands that came and went over the years, Buckcherry stands in a league of their own. Not even Nickelback faded to obscurity despite their legion of detractors, unlike the band whose name is nothing more than a dyslexic take on one of the most iconic rock artists to ever exist. Bar a couple of successful singles like “Lit Up” and “Crazy Bitch”, their mark on the mainstream scene was surprisingly insignificant. They didn't inspire new blood to follow in their footsteps, nor did they have a lasting impact on rock as a whole.
15 had a few moments of potential where they branched out of the usual boundaries they relied on, but that's about as much praise as they deserve. Every release after got more and more banal. Their reach was reduced to the point that the types of baby-boomer fans that think Greta Van Fleet are the “saviors of rock n’ roll” were the only ones even bothering with Buckcherry. If they were to come back, they'd need a miracle to shoot themselves back into relevance.
News flash: they haven't changed at all. Josh Todd's voice is still as insufferable as the sound of nails on a chalkboard. The absence of guitarist Keith Nelson only made the music worse, even as he wasted his potential for years in the band. The drums？ You might as well have replaced the rotating deck of drummers they had on board after Xavier Muriel's departure with a rotating deck of drum
machines with how basic and tepid every facet of the rhythm section on
Warpaint is. Every song here screams “bootleg AC/DC”, except instead of the angry Elmo they’ve had on vocals for years, you've got a literal nose that strains to hit the higher notes because he has little to no range. They have more structure than something like The Shaggs’
Philosophy of the World, but is that really the (low) standard you want to go by when writing a record？ To its credit though, we're lucky they didn't repackage a ton of outtakes from that Spraygun War EP that Todd and Stevie D wrote a couple years ago, presumably on an extended high. The brand of sleazy cock rock that Buckcherry has been running on felt stale in 2006, and it's only gotten worse since. To make things worse, they botched a classic Nine Inch Nails song, and it still manages to be the best thing here. Really think about that.
So again, who asked for a new Buckcherry album in 2019？
