Review Summary: Hed Pe remain as bad as ever and still nobody cares.
Man, I’ve never like Hed Pe. Everything about them just seems to be a bad combination of the sounds of bands from other genres. It’s like they don’t try to do anything somewhat original or half decent. Their new album,
Truth Rising, went fairly under the radar of music acts to avoid. I decided to try this one out, because who knows, maybe they might’ve improved? Unfortunately that is not the case. They still rip off other bands blatantly, and the Subnoize record company isn’t helping on their part due to the lack of good promotion. So here we have another horrible forced album, filled with obvious rip offs of other bands and musicians it’s not even funny. They actually do get a couple of things right though, which surprised me quite a bit.
The singer, Jared Gomes, doesn’t sound very good. His attempts at melodic singing aren’t very good, whether he’s hitting notes wrong or adding a growl to a clean vocal section. His punky shouts are too reminiscent of Black Flag and his rapping is a sad imitation of Evan Seinfeld’s already horrible rapping in Biohazard. His screams and death growls only come off as screechy and annoying. He does worse imitations of good and bad artists. If this band did anything original, it would be a little more fun to listen to. The instrumentation isn’t very good either producing bad nu-metal and punk riffs that would have been deemed high quality back in 2000. Unfortunately, the riffs are generic and the bass and drums bring nothing special to the table. In this era of music, it’s all about bringing something original to the table in a clutter of generic music. Oddly enough, Hed Pe do nothing to try and make themselves unique, instead resorting to a formula that was popular back in the late 90’s/early 2000’s.
However, I can respect them for trying to make their music catchy and having their own political ideas. Yet I hate their politics. The lyrical themes here are like a twisted, mangled form of pseudo-anarchism that comes off as really stupid. However, I will state again that they decided to make the only redeeming factor here is their music being fairly catchy, even to these hardened ears. Full of bad musical clichés and a huge lack of originality,
Truth Rising won’t ever see the light of day as a good album, but dedicated fans will probably like it. For the “hardcore fans only” bin, Hed Pe’s new album wasn’t very fun to listen to, even if some of the music was somewhat catchy.
