Review Summary: You can shine your light on me and we can break through
Buckcherry's recent antics post-
Black Butterfly have led to one of the most spectacular falls from grace to ever be seen in music, primarily because their brand of cock rock got incredibly stale after it oversaturated the radio and they never actually bothered to move away from it, as well as Josh Todd's persistent alcohol use ruining his already-shaky vocals, as well as whatever the hell that one F-bomb EP and that Spraygun War thing were. The absolute nadir of it was 2019's
Warpaint, an album so mind-bogglingly crap that it made Hinder's "Lips of an Angel" look like Converge because of how spectacularly awful it was (and lets be real: nobody bothered with
Hellbound). When the singles for
Vol. 10 began lurking in the suggestions that Spotify and YouTube Music's algorithms constantly throw at me, I didn't think much, only for me to dive in during the middle of one dark and stormy night after curiosity killed the cat...and honestly...it's not bad. It's...
not bad?
This one's gonna need an explanation:
Vol. 10 isn't a grand reinvention or the band trying something brand new...but it's a return to form, if one could apply that term to Buckcherry, to their dumb fun
15-esque years. Gone are the horrors of Josh Todd's dying cat screeching on
Warpaint's title track, and they haven't stooped to blatant plagarism this time around unlike "The Alarm" from the same album, but it's the best album that Buckcherry has put out in over a decade. Todd actually started taking care of his voice (be it through sobriety or studio magic; I don't really know nor do I really care) and sounds the best that he's been since 2008. Originality is obviously lacking, but the tunes here are incredibly energetic; "This and That" opens the album with a bang with their strongest opener since "So Far", while "With You" is goddamn
infectious; "Good Time" and "Feels Like Love" do a nice job of bringing a southern rock flare into the equation, and "Summer of '69" is a nice little Bryan Adams cover, which for some reason sounds like Buckcherry trying to take on the sound of Green Day's
American Idiot, to close the album out. Stevie D (the only other member other than Todd from the golden days) and newcomer Billy Rowe provide some solid, if derivative guitar riffs, while bassist Kelly LeMieux and drummer Francis Ruiz provide a nice backbone to the stars of the show here that only enhance the large amounts of energy going around.
The two biggest problems here are the forgettable lyrics and flat production, although the latter is unfortunately the norm for most mainstream-appealing musical acts nowadays. The riffs and melodies are catchy and memorable for a day, but if you asked anyone to recite any lyrics from
Vol. 10 they would be hard-pressed to remember any even if they had just listened to the album 10 seconds prior. Ironically, by toning down the raunchiness, the lyricism suffered; what incredibly cruel irony. But at the end of the day,
Vol. 10 is packed with infectiously catchy music and not much else, so if you're looking for mindless poppy southern rock then you might actually find some value here. Whether this is a road to musical recovery or not, things are looking quite nicely for Buckcherry right now; a surprising sentiment given the prior two disasters.
