I inhaled through my mouth
Blew smoke out my nose
I felt very high
From my head to my toes

I smoked weed and it was good
All the time in the hood
I had a friend who never smoked
So I told him he should

I once broke in the lock
Into a candy factory
I went and sold some lollipops
Used the cash to buy weed

Cuz I do smoke blunts
Just in case you don't know
I inhale through my mouth
And blow the smoke out my nose

Newsflash, it feels good to smoke weed. You may never have heard of this ... read more

If there's one thing that I can trust Devin Townsend to do, it's make music that he feels like making. And right now, it seems like he's in the mood to make some uplifting hard-rockin' rock n rollarooni rock songs. At its best, this album sounds like a familiar retread of the more generic tracks from Sky Blue or Epicloud, or Transcendence, or Empath... At its worst, it's embarrassing, as with tracks like Knuckledragger and Gratitude. The one exception to this rule ... read more

This album is a great showcase of how versatile a vocalist Phil really is. We have some clean singing on The Air That I Breathe and It Dwells In Me, some grindcore gurgling on The Weak Willed, and a few odd shrieks throughout the record. But outside of these moments, you're going to hear the same metalcore screams and sk8ter boi whining you're used to with the genre, and the same metalcore "riffs", and "breakdowns", and every other metalcore convention, down to the ... read more

Any credit I could give to the band's debut is lost here, as they step away from their death metal roots and dive headfirst into uninteresting metalcore cliches. Despite the album featuring some pleasant clean-vocal passages on For Salvation and Focus Shall Not Fail, Phil's -core screams are insufferable nine times out of ten. The music is still well-produced, the band are still talented musicians, but once your boring -core strumming ends, I don't really care how good your solo ... read more

I feel like each song here has some kind of appeal, but I can't really imagine being a fan, liking EVERY song here, because there is so little quality control. The opening track Prayer suggests the band have immediately sanitized their sound after their debut, before the following Liberate strikes a fair balance between familiar aggression and the more melodic sound of this record. Lyrically, the album is much more personal than the dark tales of abusers and psychopaths from their debut, ... read more

This is a solid melodic death metal album, if not one that I'd ever seek out to listen to. The instrumentals are well-produced, heavy, and generally well-composed, leaving me just to wish that the vocals were better. They're at their best on From These Wounds, where they're a bit lower in the mix, and more an energetic shout than a metalcore scream. Phil's unfortunately the weak link here, and with a better performance this could honestly be a great album.

Despite being pretty corny, and whiny, and a bit formulaic, this album is just various shades of alright. The band are at their best when Mike Shinoda takes the lead, and the Chester follows to match his energy, on tacks like Forgotten or Points of Authority. Cure For The Itch is a great instrumental track that showcases the band's earnest respect for classic hip-hop with Joe Hahn on the cut. Overall I'm unoffended, but wish that the band would better play into their strengths, rather ... read more

I'm always surprised every time I listen to this album. Whether it sounds worse than I remember, or better than I remember, or more or less boring than I remember, it's always a fresh experience. Maybe that's a symptom of it being largely forgettable.

I "got into" Disturbed around age 14, which is probably the least surprising thing I could say about Disturbed. I latched onto tracks like Stupify, The Game, and Voices, as they actually stood out among the track list, ... read more

This album is not as great as its greatest moments, even if it's not really as ugly as its worst moments. In a way, it's a very fitting metaphor for Kanye himself. The man's an excellent producer, and much of this album is beautiful instrumentally, from the distorted blues guitar riffs on Gorgeous, to the stark piano on Runaway, to the rich strings on track 4's interlude, or the piano and guitar solos on Devil In A New Dress. Tragically though, some piano, strings, and ... read more

Just when I thought A Perfect Circle couldn't produce a worse album cover, they give us Edward Slitherhands here, having seemingly pulled a Nosferatu cosplayer off the street while on his way to one of those cybergoth raves. But jokes aside, this is the best Twenty One Pilots album.

The band give a much more subdued and mellow performance than we've heard on their previous albums, but in the process come through with their most creative and expressive work yet. The album opens with a ... read more

There is a certain flavor of cringe that puts a big dumb smile on my face. And a dark, oppressive, emo rock cover of Imagine is exactly the kind of cringe I just have to sit back and marvel at. Yes, this is a cover album, of anti-war political hot takes made by other people, that A Perfect Circle are here to regurgitate to us.

The first thing to laugh at here is the painfully overbearing album cover, subtly conveying the message that PEACE HAS FALLEN. PEACE HAS BEEN DESTROYED! You see, war is ... read more

This album is not terrible. I may hate the cover, I may hate the aesthetic, but I really don't hate the music overall. I was actually impressed by just how consistently interesting each track on the album is, despite the band sounding even more like diet Tool than their first release.

The Package is, in a single track, heavier than Tool's entire discography combined. Pet as well is a satisfying, chunky, nu-metal piece with a heavy low-end and discordant guitar riffs. Weak and ... read more

Put simply, this is diet Tool. It (thankfully) sounds closer to their debut album than their more pretentious works, but it does still suffer from many of the same problems a standard Tool album does. Maynard's vocal performance is generally insufferable, though the instrumentals are a passable flavor of post-grunge.

Judith is the standout track of the album. It features the best chorus of any song here, with Maynard's energetic delivery of "it's not like you KILLED ... read more

Tool surprise me yet again with their least offensive project to date, Fear Inoculum. While the title is a bit pretentious, this album's blend of doom metal and hard rock makes for a reasonably listenable listen. There are no short songs here, no radio rock filler, nothing but serious and genuine expressions of creativity, and I admire that.

The album notably features some very pleasant guitar solos, especially on Decending, a track that's otherwise rather limp, boring, and ... read more

I expected at this stage in Tool's career that they might begin to slow down as many bands do. The opening Vicarious at first sounded very tired to me, like Tool running out of ideas and recycling the same worn out tone and aesthetic as their previous albums. But something different is going on here. As the song goes on, rather than sounding tired, it feels stripped-back and raw, revisiting the sound and attitude of their first album. While I don't like it, because I don't like ... read more

An album this straightforward is surprisingly hard to analyze. There are two tracks here, one being slow and gloomy, the other being up-tempo and energetic. Both songs are entirely instrumental and share a similar structure, starting off relatively tame, and ramping up in intensity through their 20-minute runtimes. There are central riffs and hooks that the band return to periodically throughout a song, but otherwise veer off into their own instrumental jams. Every second is enjoyable and ... read more

This music really speaks for itself, doom metal tastefully accented by cello, violin, and church bells. If these ideas are appealing to you, as they are to me, you should check this out.

As for myself though, I have to admit that this album doesn't command my attention as much as I've felt that it should. There is so little variance in the songs themselves, that passages and ideas sound like they're being reused from track to track, even if they're not. The band's ... read more

Tool have the unique ability to make me hate the very idea of the bass guitar. Carrying on the tradition from their first two albums, the band continue to write songs driven by in-your-face time signatures that the listener could not miss if they wanted to. The bass riffs, and even Maynard's awkward vocal work on Schism, exist to place emphasis on specific beats to accentuate the oddity of the time signatures, effectively fishing for compliments from the listener. If you don't notice ... read more

If this album sounds like a man who just discovered what autotune is, and also has no idea how to write a song from the ground up, that's probably because that's exactly what 808's & Heartbreak is. Kanye sets aside his classic soul-sampling production in favor of composing his own melodies, and shows that he's absolutely not up to the task. Much of the album is outright laughable, as he gives us bad keyboard renditions of other genres like glam rock, post-grunge, and ... read more

I have discovered that my very conception of "cringe" was likely formed by listening to Tool in my childhood years. The band's performative dreariness is on full display here, this album being a massive step down in quality from their first. Though the production is inconsistent (compare Stinkfist to Hooker With a Penis), any edge to the guitar tone has been replaced with a dull hum suitable for rock radio play. Heaviness is not even a factor on much of the album, the title track ... read more