FOR SO LOO-OO-OOONG…
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[3.75]
Anthony Easton: Someone needs a hug and a reminder that God loves him. Also, maybe some honey throat lozenges for all that Cookie Monstering.
[4]
Megan Harrington: What if Jesse Lacey only had the verbal skills of Dishwalla? You’d have “Wrong Side of Heaven,” a Jesus Christ pose without any delicacy. Five Finger Death Punch match their plodding ballad to a message encouraging listeners to support veterans; I’m empathetic, but it’s easy enough to separate song and video and their Support The Troops campaign only distracts from the song’s blatant awfulness. This is the most rudimentary and dangerous understanding of Christianity, the kind that encourages self-identifying as righteous and saved. It’s unsurprising that the band slugs through it, screaming to force emotional highs where there aren’t any. “Wrong Side of Heaven” is more alienating than comforting.
[2]
Patrick St. Michel: Plodding plodding shouty music — tie it to whatever well-meaning-but-unrelated music video you want and it still is a slog.
[3]
Thomas Inskeep: Well, in the hard-crunchy-yet-melodic-rock sweepstakes, it’s certainly better than the new Nickelback single. Lead singer Ivan Moody has a richer, more resonant voice than is normally associated with this genre, especially when not going all aggro-hernia-esque. But overall there’s not so much to differentiate this from countless other Rockstar Mayhem Festival bands.
[4]
Micha Cavaseno: As far as nu-metal bands go, Five Finger Death Punch exist in the more traddy, Disturbed world of making pop-metal jams for radio rock. It’s a mookish field of dudes with shaved heads, righteous fists of indignation, big choruses and lyrics that mean absolutely nothing, and FFDP haven’t broken from this trend. Big riffs of no value, thunderous drama, and a hollow body, this band has been a Trojan Horse from jump and nothing has changed. The insidious fact is that as bands from more progressive and ambitious fields — NWOAHM, nu-metal, metalcore, you name it — fall by the wayside, these pedantic bands never go away.
[1]
Iain Mew: There are some words that sound particularly proper delivered in TOTAL SERIOUSNESS amidst clouds of fake smoke. “Righteous” is one of them, even before you bring heaven and hell in. Beyond that joy, I particularly like the way that Five Finger Death Punch growl right in the background to give their melodies just a bit more edge, and make the couple of times the growl is forefronted that bit more dramatic.
[7]
Brad Shoup: All those e-brake flips into bellowing and all the darkness/light contrasts are so camp, but so is that delightful bridge, which channels A Perfect Circle more than I would ever have expected from these dudes.
[5]
Jonathan Bogart: I wish I could believe anything was so dramatic as this music wants to be. Certainly the operations of an individual soul are not.
[4]