Review Summary: It's no Wisconsin Love Trip people.
I don't know much about Wisconsin besides the fact that they can make some great cheese, which alone makes them pretty awesome in my book. And while this album has nothing at all to do with cheese, I can at least still consider it the other great thing I know of that comes from Wisconsin. Fueled by testosterone, powered by Wayne Static's hair, Wisconsin Death Trip is a hard-hitting balls-out industrial metal album that was lucky enough to be released during the genre's prime along with similar albums like Tonight the Stars Revolt! (Powerman 5000), Hybrid Theory (Linkin Park), and Significant Other (Limp Bizkit), giving new-to-the-scene Static-X some solid exposure right from the outset.
And like those albums, it contains all of the standard-issue elements you'd expect to hear from any one of them: huge, larger than life production; simple, highly distorted, and prominent guitar lines full of staccato stop/go rhythms; and a drummer who you won't get to hear much of because he's not an aforementioned crunchy guitar line. And while there is some synchronized guitar playing between Wayne and Koichi, there's really nothing technical to speak of on musical terms about the album at all. Not that there has to be though, because what it does have is its catchiness and memorable simple beats, which are the kind of things that will make this one more enjoyable to most than your average metal album would be, even as generic as the riffs are on paper.
Wayne Static's voice also sets this one apart, where as accessible as the album might be, he's not afraid to occasionally be as abrasive-sounding as his poor vocal cords allow him to be. This is one of the few Static albums where he lets the deeper side of his voice run free, whereas most newer albums would often constrain him to that high-pitched-shrill side alone. It usually manages to sound good though and blends with the music well, adding some lightning (generated by his hair on command) to an already thick, thunderous album.
And all in all, it's actually a lot of fun. "Push It" is still to this day Static's most well-known and signature song, being especially catchy and great for workouts even though I have no idea what exactly we're pushing. Songs like "I'm With Stupid" (no relation to the SpongeBob episode) and the title track are some of the fastest songs on the album and definitely where it often excels the most, even though Static likes to try their hand at the slower songs quite a bit on this particular album. With its dance metal influences these often work too, generally on songs like "The Trance is the Motion" and "Love Dump", but that's not to say it always works quite as well as I'd hoped.
Wisconsin Death Trip is a pretty tightly-wound album musically, perhaps why several tracks just don't seem to live up to the rest of the album. "Stem" in particular, which isn't terrible on its own, but this along with other tracks like "Otsegolation" just never really seem to take off and instead sit stagnant almost the entire length of the song. "December" might be the best example, which attempted the then-trendy anticlimatic metal album ending, but forgot that indeed, it still needs to go somewhere over its approximately 6 minute runtime.
And of course, it doesn't take listening to this particular Static-X album to figure out that Wayne isn't exactly much of a poet either. ("YOUR ASS SMELLS LIKE A ROSEEEEEE!!") This is the guy who somehow managed to fit killing something every other line, masturbation, and eating cake all into one album (read: Shadow Zone), which I can't say I entirely disapprove of, but I don't think he's winning too many awards for that any time soon. Hell, if Static decided to go The Ringer on us and joined the Special Olympics for a thoughtful lyrics writing event, he'd still end up the only guy there who didn't win a hug.
So no, don't expect some technical masterpiece or Ralph Waldo Emerson, this is just Static-X doing what they do best, and for that, it is very much what it strives to be. If you liked any of their industrial/nu-metal contemporaries from the turn of the millenium, you'd be doing yourself a disservice to not at least give this one a shot. This one may require a little more tolerance for metal than they did and may not click for everyone, but if you always enjoyed those albums and just wanted to turn the "angry" level up, then go grab yourself some cheese, crank up the bass, and let the relaxing sounds of Wisconsin Death Trip soothe your soul.
