It is, perhaps, a little unkind to find Jacoby Shaddix so amusing, even now he no longer calls himself Coby Dick. Here, after all, is a man who has survived poverty, a dysfunctional family, excessive drug and alcohol use, acute teenage depression, a ropey marriage, problem fatherhood and astonishly accelerated nu-metal fame.
For all the angst, though, he continues to come on like a clumsy, galumphing puppy rather than a paragon of angst-battered cool. "Emotional swords" slash his soul on 'Time And Time Again', "And now the pain takes control." "You're making me want to end this relationship," he concludes, emotionally wrung dry but still more ridiculous than actually moving.
Relax, girls, he's still married. And, it must be said, surprisingly good at making nu-metal seem a genre capable of providing entertainment to the over-tens. 'LoveHateTragedy' rarely engages the emotions in the way Shaddix planned.
But, much like its predecessor 'Infest', it's hard to deny Papa Roach have a certain knack of crafting big, glossy, annoyingly catchy anthems for the Kerrang TV generation. Actually, there's plenty about 'LoveHateTragedy' that harks back to an older, less therapy-fixated period of heavy rock.
The superbly naff cover - a baby clad in giant headphones and making the devil sign - is as gormlessly iconic as the smoking angels that graced the sleeve of Black Sabbath's 'Heaven And Hell'. What's more, Shaddix has wisely stopped trying to rap, apart from on the first single 'She Loves Me Not'.
Instead, he opts for an echoey, melodramatic style of singing that aligns him perilously close to the '80s school of Spandex and hairspray bands. Last year, dotmusic saw Shaddix - a man with an at best confused relationship with irony - tell a Brixton Academy audience to wave their lighters aloft and take "it back to 1985, like Bon Jovi and shit." Evidently, he meant it: the likes of the title track and 'Decompression Period' are power ballads where psychobabble have replaced guiltlessness. "I need some space to clear my head," he moans.
But for all its talk of unimaginable suffering and grief, much of 'LoveHateTragedy' sounds hugely triumphalist. There's even a last-minute, oddly decent version of the Pixies' 'Gouge Away' that suggests these daft, troubled, outrageously rich men might own a few decent records, too. Crazy stuff, then: just not quite in the way Shaddix might've envisaged.
