Otep – Smash the Control Machine
Posted on October 07, 2009 at 8:32 pm by admin
I keep on saying that I don’t believe that a genre is inherently bad, and it’s come time to really show that my word is as strong as oak. I’ve finally stumbled upon what could be one of the most tolerable new nu-metal albums.
At their heart, Otep is pretty much a Korn clone with a womans sandy voice. While you know the drill, string slack, a little bit of funk bass, super-short riffs, drop-hopping, effects dumping, vocals over bass and drums for the verse, mumbling spoken word vocals that build up to screaming (and yes, a lot of it is partially rapped or mostly rapped). There’s also quite a few slower songs that stick mostly to effect dumping guitars playing something thin and high with a roaming bassline and tons of spoken word lyrics, and in a way that gives the album a few more hills and valleys.
The songs that start standing out the most is the near Egyptian like portions of “Where the River Ends” (an 8-minute song that manages not to feel too long, though there’s a ton of silence followed by a secret song of ambience and more spoken word, cliche damnit!), the southern styled title track (which is way too obvious of a title) and the piano ballad “Ur a Wmn Now” (why does that song need to be intentionally misspelled?!)
Honestly the vocals are tight, though completely obvious and cliche, and even catchy pretty often. The downside about the album? As well done and sort of fun songs are with the exception of the special 3 mentioned, still basically a Korn clone, and rest on old nu-metal cliches.
Released August 18th, 2009
Otep at MySpace
Victory Records at MySpace
Buy this album at Amazon.com and Amazon.ca
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