In 1999 after releasing "Significant Other" Limp Bizkit sat on the crown of Nu-Metal without knowing that they will get one of the most hated bands with their 2000 release "Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavoured Water". They won new fans, lost their old and their good reputation started to crumble. But with the announcement that Wes Borland(guitar player) left the band their fall has just begun ...
That's the way how most people would describe Limp Bizkit's career. I personally like the band very much and find "Chocolate Starfish And The Hot Dog Flavoured Water" not that horrible as people always claim. In my opinion its a very good album. But what they released a month before Christmas 2001 made me also turn my back on them.
They released “New Old Songs” in fact that Wes left the band and they wanted to bridge the waiting time for their next release. Not a bad idea but why should a metalband release a “hip hop” remix record in the low point of it’s career? This really doesn’t make sense. In fact no member of them except Fred Durst (Vocals) and DJ Lethal (DJ) had it’s fingers in the pie on remixing the songs although Lethal’s contribute with two songs wasn’t that much. So what you are hearing on the album is not the input of the band but the work of some celebreties mostly from the hip hop corner. They took a song, cut the guitar out, made the drumbeat’s hip hop sounding, put some annoying effects on it and so they created this bad remix cocktail.
Oh my god were the first words that left my mouth. It was a big shock at that time to hear such songs from my heroes. I heard the sound of the whole cd said it’s just a collection of ***ty songs and the case was done. Today it’s not that tragic to hear this what’s does not mean that I changed my opinion about this because the songs hadn’t changed over the years.
While the remix of Nookie flows pretty well it just leaves – what I call – “the oh effect” which runs like this. You listen to the song, the song is over and you just think that it was ok but you never would listen to this again. Break Stuff got a mess. It has nothing to do with the original version because in the remix there is not a single reference except of the lyrics and the singing melodies. Apart from that the beat is totally boring and repetitive. One of the better efforts was Crushed. The song is pretty decent arranged. There aren’t too much effects here which is a good balance to most of the other songs. And Crushed was actually the first song on which the singing melodies and the beat worked well together. Another well done remix is Re-Arranged because the remixer used the same formula as on Crushed. What I also like on the song was the performance of Bubba Sparxxx which raps gave the song a memorable hook. How can you destroy a rap song with remixing it to another rap song? Ask DJ Lethal because his remix of Getcha Groove On is really awful. He gave the song an unoriginal boring beat which even I could have produced on “music maker”. The song also has no highlight it just flows and nothing stucks in your head.
I think that’s enough of giving you an example of what’s this about because if I would write on I would just repeat myself.
This album is just a cheap compilation of making classics to ***. If I hear those songs I really don’t wonder that Borland has left the band. The only songs which are worth checking out are Crushed and Re-Arranged but only for people which are open to hip hop. Otherwise it really has nothing special to offer and that is reason enough to save your money for something else.