Review Summary: when keeping it real goes boring
ChugChugWob is a band from the Twin Cities, in Minnesota. They play music, and recently they recorded an album. They have five members, who presumably have learned how to play their instruments for some time, though this album does not suggest that. They likely all have ideas and creative forces that drive them to be expressive in some capacity, but this album does not suggest that either. They play a mixture of metalcore and dubstep, though mixture in this sense is like saying that wine and cheese combines wine and cheese. They are likely passionate about music, and they are probably passionate about being in a band. I think it is fair to say that this is all factual, so how is it that, based on these facts, this group of people can create something so offensively pointless and dull?
A name like ChugChugWob is supposed to be self-aware. It’s supposed to be a joke at the band’s own expense, but these types of jokes only work when you are parodying the idea you are satirizing. ChugChugWob do not offer any satire. Their music is a vapid, thoughtless void, a blank spot on an MRI of the brain. Not even a million monkeys in a million rooms with a million typewriters apiece could craft something this forgettable. Trying to remember what happened during this album makes me feel like I have Alzheimer’s. Nowhere in the runtime of this album is there any attempt at novelty or unique presentation at all. Repeated listens to the album leave no impressions, no lasting imprints on the listener - in retrospect, they will struggle to remember whether they listened to anything at all.
The band alleges to mix metalcore and dubstep, but what this constitutes is that for most of the record metalcore is played, and then every once in a while there is some pointless, completely disconnected electronic music played that, if you put a gun to my head and told me to call it dubstep, I might consider calling it dubstep. You’ve got your poppy choruses, you’ve got your super hard breakdowns, and of course you’ve got your chug chug. Again, the band's name can only function as a funny joke if they don't do exactly what they’re making fun of, but I’m certain that someone will prove the existence of bigfoot before the guitarists learn they have more than two frets. The worst part about this whole exercise is that when the band isn’t doing something as forgettable as possible, they’re doing it badly. The singer struggles to hit his notes, the guitar is mixed poorly, the bass is nonexistent, the lyrics are horrendous, there are spoken word samples placed at random, and the drums sound lifeless. Keyboards are sprinkled in at random with no desire to sound cohesive and they almost always overpower the mix. The album exists, so it seems to follow that someone tried hard to make it sound good, but I really cannot convince myself that this is the case.
Why was this album made? It’s not interesting as metal, it’s not interesting as dance music, and it’s not interesting as music. Reflecting on it, this type of album is the logical conclusion of a trend started a decade or more ago, as artists struggled more and more to produce something that would, hopefully, make them money. This is a cash grab, an exercise in banal bandwagoning. It’s either some ironic, 50 minute joke by the bandmembers that doesn’t work, or they genuinely tried their hardest to make this album, and if that’s the case, that’s just… sad.
