Review Summary: The near definition of repulsive.
It’s Friday night. Late, late at night. Too late for your own good. You’re way past the point of even close to sober, and you’re stumbling around the bar, looking for your friends, crashing into stools and such. In your hops fueled lethargia, you look hopelessly for that one girl who you thought maybe was kind of looking at you earlier, but that was around 4 beers and a bit too many shots ago. She’s long gone. You hang your head in shame. Another night you’re wasted, alone, and feeling as empty and shallow inside as you possibly can. You savor the feeling, and damn the day you ever feel it again. That same feeling emanates your soul as you press play on this latest album from Texas hillbilly hooligans Hellyeah. Empty, shallow, and a sense of embarrassment. It’s just all too familiar.
“Blood For Blood” is far beyond anything I can ever understand to be artistic. It’d be absurd to expect a band named Hellyeah to release anything different than what they do, and you know what they say about assumptions. I knew exactly what I was going to be listening to before I hit play, and I got exactly what I believed it would be. In that sense, I applaud Hellyeah for delivering the goods, and by goods I mean the exact opposite.
"Blood For Blood” is about as musically diverse as a bag of rocks. Almost every song is mid-tempo, sometimes faster, and has the same lazy hillbilly groove. Their first two albums, this tactic sort of worked, to a minor extent. I ever so slightly enjoyed “Band of Brothers”, and the previous albums were at the very least, moderately bearable. Sort of like a headache, but it’s only on one side of your head. However, for whatever reason it may be, the shtick has run its course, and “Blood For Blood” comes off as an all around embarrassing attempt at an album, complete with aping from their past bands poorly and some of the worst lyricism I have ever heard before.
From the opening, “Sangre Por Sangre (Blood For Blood)”, you get that cliched riff fest that inevitably goes absolutely nowhere. It doesn’t even feel like there is any build up of any sort to these songs. They just exist in this realm of sounding almost identical for 3 minutes, and proceeding to the next, like a flock of locusts hunting for prey. Musically, the isolated components of Hellyeah, or at least 2/4 of it, have a background in high profile and somewhat acclaimed musical groups. Vinnie Paul was a pretty decent drummer in his Pantera days, and Chad Gray was a unique vocalist in his Mudvayne years. For whatever reason, they’ve either lost this, or they’ve decided to forgo their talents in order to fit in as the house band on Thirsty Tuesday’s at some seedy bar. There is no artistry to these songs whatsoever. Even the tribute track, “Black December”, which is dedicated to the memory of Dimebag Darrell, former Pantera guitarist who was famously gunned down while performing live in 2004, comes off as contrived and not emotional touching at all. I understand there are humans behind these songs, and I understand that having your brother murdered in front of you is nothing any of us should ever make light of, but the track itself with its historical sentiment removed, is not at all what a tribute is or should be.
Even the sappy ballads, such as “Moth” and “Hush”, feel as emotionally vacant and enticing as a Hoobastank song, and that’s even a stretch. The lyrics are centered around, from what I can gather, threatening suicide and emotional problems . This normally makes for some of music’s most intimate and touching lyricism, a la “New Death Sensation”. Only problem is, this sounds like the dramatic note a 13 year old leaves when their parents don’t let them go to the mall because they have a test the next day. The band members are in their mid to late 40’s, releasing songs like “DMF”, which is a gracious censorship of the mature “Die Mother***er’”. I don’t expect striking lyricism, but unless you’re just developing upper lip hair and discovering the treasures of Google search with no filter, lyrics like “Die mother ***er” are inexcusably asinine and almost insulting. Its lyrics like this that make Chief Keef seem like Walt Whitman, and no one ever needs that to happen.
As I said before, the album has moments where it seems they try to recapture some sound or trademark from their past lives and infuse it into their new found humdrum. “Say When” sounds like something that could have been on “Far Beyond Driven”, for about 40 seconds, than it slowly slips back into more of the same old sound. That’s the progression of the song. Like “Use My Third Arm” and the end of “Suicide Note Pt.2” meshed together, in a much less musically enticing way altogether. One of the lead singles, “Cross To Bier” is extremely close to what Mudvayne sounded like, and I can absolutely understand why they chose it to be the single. It sounds nothing like anything else on this album at all, and the bait of putting forth the one okay song from an otherwise abysmal album is certainly nothing new.
There’s so many jokes that could be made about the band and album. Immature minds would explode from the lazy joke telling that can come from a band named Hellyeah whose music is almost unanimously rejected and labeled as atrocious. I really did try to at the very least defend this band after “Band of Brothers”, even if all I could say was at least they plugged in their instruments correctly. After listening to “Blood For Blood”, its insipid lyricism and almost unbelievable monotony, I think defending them would be like some form of public suicide. Just like that feeling you get when you walk out of another bar, wasted again. You ponder the possibility of quitting drinking and seeing a matchmaker to find you a nice girl who you can marry. This album was some sort of life changing experience in that I never want to be a 40 year old man with a Mohawk who makes songs called “Die Mother***er”. I’d rather be suffocated like they did in “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest”. This album left me feeling almost a sense of embarrassment for the band members and I feel almost pity for them. Sometimes it takes the nadir to see the peak, so there may some positivity to this. Can I get a Hellyeah to that!?
