For your career then, lads. Papa Roach’s first album sold 12 million copies worldwide, riding 2001’s nu-metal wave. But the wave broke, much bigger bands like Limp Bizkit and Korn suddenly floundered, and when 1992’s "Lovehatetragedy" sank without trace, the world suspected it had heard the last of the first-division Californian rockers.
Yet here they are. A second chance? Maybe. Crunch time? Definitely. So it’s just in the nick of time that Papa Roach have found an ear for a great tune. And if it’s not exactly getting away with murder, three tracks in it certainly looks like it’s get-out-of-jail time. And sonically, it’s the title track that holds the key to this album of short, crunchy, often fantastic, rockers and slow-burning stomps.
Frontman Jacoby Shaddix’s lyrics have dropped the sixth-form complexities of previous work and do what all great lyrics should – get from A to B by the quickest route. Choruses like “I feel irrational/so confrontational/To tell the truth again I’m getting away with murder” may be mood-by-numbers, but where before he sounded like he was in the next room having a rant at mom and dad, here they’re tight. Occasionally, as on the standout track "Scars", the vocals beat out a tune of their own, like some metal Bo Diddley. It’s a neat trick.
It’s a question of being tight. In part, the songs – and in "Scars", "Blood", "Harder Than A Coffin Nail", there are at least three singles here – just sound terrific because the band that’s playing them is laced up so tightly together. Papa Roach claim the “kick in the balls” served up to them by "Lovehatetragedy"’s commercial suicide did them a massive favour by consigning them to small club gigs for another year, and that they’ve become a “proper band” rather than a group.
On this album, you can hear it in the presence of a new bandleader: The star of the show is drummer Dave Buckner, whose army-ant tom-toms nail the sludgy, grinding detuned guitar howl right to the wall, and don’t let it go. The stomping, war-dance feel that permeates "Getting Away With Murder" is largely down to his role as drill-sergeant. Just listen to the way "Blanket Of Fear" advances like a zombie, all unstoppable and cold. It’s bleak. It’s gothic. It’s quite barmy. And it’s great, unexpected B-movie fun.
There are howlers. Shaddix still occasionally lays himself open to charges of over-emoting with lines about “caring too much” and how “you’ve made my life completely miserable”; the uniform guitar fuzz isn’t the sharpest of tools to crack a song with; the production, while razor-sharp, has ground away some of the light and shade of their debut. But this isn’t their debut. This is a determined little bastard of a record by a band in a bug-eyed, rhythmic sweat, who know it’s time to come out with their guns blazing.
The question is: what does anyone have a right to expect from a Papa Roach album? And with this – a career-best delivered not one second too soon, an album that 90% of their contemporaries (give or take Marilyn Manson) would be happy to be remembered by – it’s a question Papa Roach couldn’t care less about dodging.
