Review Summary: A drowning pool decomposing into soil
To say the least, things have been rough for Drowning Pool after Dave Williams died. They’ve made a few good songs, but as a whole, their albums have never been as good as “Sinner”. There could be many reasons for that, among them a big identity crisis. They’ve kept changing singers, which changed the sound of the band as a whole, and gives the impression that they couldn’t really find their sound. Hearing all those albums feels like you’re listening to 4 different bands, and some are clearly better than others. Let’s see that with their 3rd album “Full Circle”, which feels really strange coming from Drowning Pool, can be a rough listen at times, but it’s so confusing that it’s, you guessed it… really interesting to review.
The singer on this album is Ryan McCombs from Soil. He has a really gruff, deep and raspy voice that can be recognized instantly, and he can bring a lot of energy to a song, like on the title track that opens the album. It’s a short, fast and angry, kind of punk song about how it’s “my time to rise above you”, and “my life, a crown of thorns”, which kind of echoes the themes of “Sinner”. “Shame” is another heavy track, but longer and with a dark, twisted feel. It seems to be about the narrator having an affair and intimidating his mistress into keeping her silence. “Don’t you speak my name”, he repeats with a tone I can’t really label. Disgust, shame maybe? The song isn’t at all about the thrill of having an affair, everything about it feels weirdly unsettling. In that context, lines like “let me touch you, let me get inside you” feel utterly disgusting.
This is one of the few songs on this album that really displays Drowning Pool’s trademark dark and unhinged vibe. The rest of the album isn’t like that. In fact, a lot of it sounds like Ryan’s previous band, and a lot like a cheap Alice in Chains rip-off.
For example, “Enemy”, right after the title track, sounds like an angrier Soil track, and it’s actually about Ryan leaving his former band. But its loudness and rage are pretty enjoyable, especially the venom in his voice when he sings “The words you used were mine, you used a thousand times”. “Soldiers” doesn’t really sound like either Drowning Pool or Soil, but it’s kind of catchy in a big, dumb way. It could be considered military propaganda, but it honestly doesn’t make any kind of statement on anything. That was the heavy songs, a good part of the album consists of rock ballads that may or may not get heavier on the chorus. My favorite of those is “Reborn”, with its powerful chorus about “the hell I’ve gone through to be reborn, reborn!”. It’s a pretty good “I’ve survived everything” song.
Other songs are a little weaker. “Reasons I’m Alive” begins with a heavy riff but goes quieter on the verses, kind of lacking in energy until the end where Ryan repeats “Watch me fly, watch me fly away!”. Kind of ridiculous. There are other similar songs like “Paralyzed”, “37 Stitches” and “No More”, which kind of blend together and are all full of generic angsty lyrics about some unnamed person who hurt the narrator so bad. “You’ve ruined me”, “Paralyzed” keeps repeating. At least, the song’s melancholy gets to me sometimes, but I wouldn’t call it great. “37 Stitches” is a nice grungy ballad, but it quickly becomes so repetitive and boring, just like a lot of the album. “Upside Down” has more energy, it’s more of a straight up rock track, but it has the same “you hurt me” lyrics, or rather “you got me hanging upside down”.
“No More” may have the angriest and most obvious “You hurt me” type of lyrics, beginning with “Your words have crippled me”. You can’t really top that. That may be why they stop the depressing grunge ballads, and move on to energetic, lighter rock songs after “No More”. “Love X” is even more embarrassing than previous tracks, but in a different way, with this incredibly childish “I don’t need your love, love” chorus. But “Duet” is really catchy, and way more fun. The album ends on an even more fun cover of Billy Idol’s “Rebel Yell”, because it somehow became an unspoken rule that every nu metal album should have an out of place 80s cover. But honestly, Drowning Pool’s version of “Rebel Yell” sounds nice, it’s catchy and much livelier than a lot of the album. Ryan’s gruff voice shouldn’t work for a song like that, but it does.
This album was messy. I keep listening to it, to try to process it, but it still doesn’t make any sense to me. There aren’t actually that grungy ballads, but they seem to go on forever. If I’m in the right mood, I can sort of enjoy them, but they always end up boring me. As for the hard rock songs (I don’t think anything on this album can really be called nu metal), they tend to be better, but you still get some really dumb tracks like "Soldiers" and “Love X”. Even the good songs couldn’t really be considered Drowning Pool’s best songs, because they really don’t feel like Drowning Pool.
The songs cover many different styles, but for most of them, even the good ones, it feels very strange, almost wrong, to call them Drowning Pool songs. Even their other albums, whatever you could say about them, use a style that feels similar to “Sinner” even if they’re not as good. But this one… I think the main problem, aside from a lack of good ideas, is that Drowning Pool is trying to turn into Soil. Except Ryan McCombs has actually made some good albums with Soil. “Full Circle” is nothing like “Redefine”, it feels instead like Soil at their dullest, least inspired, like a poor man’s Alice in Chains. Not a bad idea on paper, but really bad execution. That’s why this album was a one-time experimentation, completely different from Drowning Pool’s previous and next albums. That’s the reason why I decided to review it for my month of disappointments, rather than its predecessor “Desensitized”. I get why people were disappointed by “Desensitized”, and why they’d consider “Full Circle” an improvement. Even I couldn’t really bring myself to hate this album. But to me, “Desensitized” is just a dumbed-down version of “Sinner”, nothing really worth discussing. However, “Full Circle” is the more interesting disappointment to discuss, because of its strange choices, its brief moments of brilliance lost between dull, dumb moments. Come and be baffled by this album if you dare.
