Hollywood Undead - Five

After their less than welcome time in the limelight as 2008′s token rap rock/metal revivalists, and making a basic cardboard-flavored case for it, Hollywood Undead are now trying their hand at formulaic alternative swooners and alt-rap-metal wannabe bangers. On Five can be heard plenty of vapid references to drinking and nondescript partying in California, “hard” messages to the “haters” (who clearly get to them), soppy clean-sung choruses, blatant Recovery-era slow Eminem copycatting, early 2010′s LMFAO-ish electronic bits, and even a lovely reference to the too-successful Saliva song “Click Click Boom” on the very first track. I’ll be honest, for the first time since starting this, I’m writing this after just one listen; I just don’t think I can stomach repeating this almost-hour-long album. I just wanted to give this album a fair chance since I thought this group had fallen off the face of the Earth somewhere around 2011 and was surprised to see them on the charts again (how?). But one run through is this album’s fair chance; at this point I’m just writing this in some attempt to get some satisfaction from the hour I spent on this thing.

Hollywood Undead sound dated again on this album, just a different type of dated this time, reveling awkwardly in a compilation of what worked on the charts in 2010.

To find some positivity in this mess was hard, but I’ll say I could find one little bit in the song “Renegade”: the only accomplished task of a hard-hitting rap-metal song. But even the album’s sole highlight drags on with an eventually annoying refrain through the same formula all the other songs adhere to. But between this and that other “90′s metal revival” album from Ded earlier this year, it’ll be a hard pick for my least favorite album I’ve heard all year, if I do indeed end up putting myself through that misery at the end of this year for a wall of shame list or something. I don’t know if I’d want to sit through those two side by side though.