Review Summary: (PART 6) r/im14andthisisdeep: the b-movie horror movie concept album
(disowned. I got too pissed during the review process and tired and angry, so it comes off as extremely angry and emotional.)
OTEP DISCOGRAPHY, PART 666: HYDRA
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Ahh, Hydra. Hydra. Hydra.
If you know of this album, I guarantee you it’s because of one song, the catchy single “Apex Predator”. It’s a decently catchy song about you being a serial killer, with a good lyrical flow and some interesting programming to flesh it out more. When played live, it sounds even better, ten times more crunchy and metal than the studio version. Lines like “Nobody move nobody gets hurt/but where’s the fun in that/I got to satisfy the urge” are simply iconic in Otep’s canon, and stands as one of Otep’s best.
….Now with all the positives of HYDRA out of the way (and I mean it), into the… cesspit of negatives. Because frankly, this album is not a blowtorch nightlight, but a garbage trashfire.
Otep’s HYDRA is a concept album where it is a musical and conceptual rehash of itself, causing its problems to balloon exponentially and implode into oblivion.
First of all, most of the songs here feel like poor imitations of old Otep songs. “Necromatic” is basically a poor clone of “Emtee” from Sevas Tra, having a quiet section before quickly moving to loud guitars, except with less of a surprise or impact than the aforementioned song. “Hag” is also a close clone of “Hooks and Splinters” and/or “Self-Made” from House of Secrets by rehashing that “brOOtal” pre-chorus/chorus acceleration, if it weren’t for the introduction and ending. (Also, “Hooks…” and “Hag” both say “I hope you die!”). It may feel insignificant, but when reading the lyrics it comes off as creative bankruptcy.
Any decency the music can offer is lost to digital processing and production; The guitars and vocals sound uncomfortably compressed (when Otep screams it feels as if there is audible distortion), the bass tone is weak and limping, and all three issues are compounded into a digitised mess.
I’m not saying the guitar riffs are bad- they are decent at best, average at worst; but the use of a drum machine slows the pace of the album; “Blowtorch Nightlight” and “Seduce and Destroy”, the latter which suffers from awful trip-hop styled programming to the chorus. The programming is so bog-standard I could probably find it on YouTube for free.
Actually, that fact alone sums up the production values: cheap. Vinesauce Joel’s MIDI’s sound better and more complex with much less effort.
Oh, and I haven’t even discussed the album’s “concept” here; frankly, there isn’t even a reason to, because it’s barely even a concept record.
There’s literally no clear story that’s identifiable apart from Otep singing about wanting to/killing people or what’s wrong with them (Otep); which in itself is an angsty cliche in general, and on overused one in Otep’s book.
Even the concept itself is a rehash of… itself? The story is seemingly about a woman who, after being captured and tormented, becomes a serial killer who is “rising like a hydra”; most of the songs in Sevas Tra effectively says this exact same thing with this exact “Us vs. Them”/“Rise above” mentality. Alternatively, “Jonestown Tea” involves killing an sexual abuser; In the same way, “Voyeur" revolves around killing an animal abuser, albeit it is dragged out to six minutes thanks to repetition, and is significantly less powerful than the formerly mentioned song. There is no nuance to try and create imagery or emotion, the latter effect which is haphazardly forced upon the listener with childish voices, screaming and weird vocal overlays; to try and understand the “meaningfulness” of the album is like trying to “deep” the lyrics to “Gucci Gang” by Lil Pump. It’s as shallow as the surface.
And it barely even holds to the “concept” it was supposed to present at times, with Otep’s ego slipping in some embarrassingly awful lyrics about society and American life, akin to Smash the Control Machine’s bad spoken word song “I Remember”, with inane lyrics (see “Quarantine”), and other edgy trite. This makes the album feel more like a vanity record than anything else, saying “HEAR MY SCREAMS!! IM SO VIOLENT AND FERAL!!”. Just because you can act scary, doesn’t men you are scary; a key crux of the album that Otep fails to recognise and solve at all.
To add further insult to the tortoise pace and poor quality of the album, the final track, “Theophagy”, an overly long boring six and a half minute song, has an additional 16 minutes and 18 seconds of silence; no hidden tracks, just silence. This constitutes for 22% of the record. Imagine if Metallica released “Load” with that “78:59” sticker, only to realise a quarter of the disc is silence? For those who paid the retail price of $13.99 for HYDRA, this is literally a scam.
This is a horrible final album. Everything Otep thinks she is proving to her critics, proves the worst parts and nothing good. It proves to Otep fans she fell off after STCM, to fans of prog metal and fans of one specific band that she can’t make a concept album, and to everyone else how pretentious she is. Not even OTEP fans can enjoy this. This might as well be the de-facto “Everywhere At The End Of Time” for OTEP fans: this album will break your patience, wallet, and allegiance to OTEP. (and I am proof of a broken man; you can only make people suffer so much before they snap.) This shouldn’t have risen like a hydra; it should have stayed in the abyss where this awful music like this belongs.
In conclusion, hear these four words:
F—k
You
Forever,
Otep.
Good riddance. I’m off to go listen to Built to Spill for ear bleach.
.
.
.
….Oh wait…There’s more?? Are you f—king kidding me-
I guess when you cut the hydra’s head, there’s always more.
1.5/5 for musical purposes
5/5 for torturing purposes
i thought “do it now so you wont have to build it up larger than it is” because I’ve had that problem in the past and i just go ad hoc in that regard
