Review Summary: Collecting the scraps
For me, Static-X are the type of band you enjoy but don’t really have a strong opinion on.
Wisconsin Death Trip and
Machine are great albums (particularly the latter), but when Wayne was alive, they weren’t a band I flocked to when they released new music. The quality of their output proceeding
Machine is an obvious indicator why, but generally there was always better industrial metal out there. Couple that with the fact
Project Regeneration Vol. 1 was a posthumous release, which cobbled together bits and bats from Wayne’s vault, and it’s easy to understand why the record was such a surprising hit for many when it came out. I think most people would agree the album is the best thing to come from the band since
Machine – with its sharp run time and lean, concise songwriting. It was an excellent album and one of the strongest metal albums to come out of 2020, with a lot of anticipation being put onto its impending successor.
Unfortunately, where
Project Regeneration Vol. 1 was astute, punchy, and attentive when it came to showcasing Static-X’s strongest attributes,
Project Regeneration Vol. 2 feels clumsy, bloated, and lacking in the magic that made the first volume so enthralling. Almost every track on
Vol.1 was heavy and extremely memorable in some way, but here the album lacks charisma and notability. It sets off strong enough, with “Stay Alive” and “Z0mbie” being an effective one-two-punch that inherits the mechanical-chugging-juggernaut songwriting and premium melodies and hooks from last time, but once you get past that second track, everything sounds depressingly bland and homogenous right up until you get to “Disco Otsego” and “From Heaven”.
Project Regeneration Vol. 2 is still a serviceable record, mind, with plenty of heavy moments and a punchy production to translate it all, but ultimately
Vol.2 is engulfed in the shadow of its predecessor’s achievements. It’s something that crossed my mind at the time, but when you’re planning multiple volumes for a posthumous release, you run the risk of using up all your good ideas in one fell swoop – and particular prudence and pragmatism should be applied so that it doesn’t come to that. How much of this album is vaulted material I couldn’t say, but the obvious answer for this album’s sharp dip in quality is that the band utilised the best material and ideas for the first record and were left with the scraps for this one.
The comparisons are night and day, and even though the album is only a couple minutes longer than
Vol.1 if you omit the bonus tracks, it drags tremendously. Personally, the band should have just made the one record – there’s nothing here that feels warranted in seeing the light of day; it’s just cookie-cutter industrial metal with none of the charm from last time. If you’re an avid fan of the band, you may find more to enjoy here than I did. For casual listeners and dabblers of Static-X like me, there’s not much here to recommend, and I don’t see much reason to revisit it again. As I said earlier, it’s competent in what it does, but it lacks the passion and soul
Vol.1 had.
