Nonpoint - X

I haven’t listened to a full Nonpoint album since being slightly intrigued about them after a friend showed me their song “Bullet with a Name”. It was a long-ass time ago and I remember listening to more of their stuff and not being impressed. And if young, low-standards, baby metalhead me wasn’t impressed in 2008, that probably says a lot. Nevertheless, I figured I’d give their new album here a shot to see what they could do with a full length ten years later. At first, I didn’t know why the hell they decided to title it what Ed Sheeran also titled his last, unavoidable album, but then I found out and I knew it wasn’t going to be good. I voiced once before on here, a while ago, that I find it so overdone, boring, lazy, and not special anymore when bands just title their albums based on how many albums they have now. It so often comes off like a lazy bit of chest-puffing, like “look how much we’ve done now”. Hollywood Undead’s album last year, Five, was the worst thing I heard all year, and the title was just the cherry on top of the shit sundae. So, what does X mean for Nonpoint? Well it’s their tenth album, and “X” is the Roman numeral that represents ten. Get it? Fucking mind-blowing. I have to mention it at one point or another so I may as well mention it now, the album cover is stupid as shit. It already has the one-letter title in the lower right-hand corner, yet the art is just a big dumb “X” hovering above a floor. Wow!

As for the music on X itself, it has me kind of conflicted. On one hand, the nu metal grooves, as simple and generic as they are, do their one job for an alternative/nu metal album, which is to just slap. If the band just focused on working around some slapping nu metal riffs, this probably would have come out alright. But X falls prey to much of what made Hollywood Undead’s latest album such a nightmare to listen to, granted not nearly as hard, but enough to make me yell at the computer like a dad with a beer yelling at the news or a football game. Just bad choices to integrate the kind of meat-headed faux rapper bravado and the kinds of whiny melodies that just don’t sound good anywhere and certainly don’t mesh with the style of nu metal they’re doing. Strangely even the band seemed to realize that they should stop with the unpalatable style pairing and the cringy lyrics about political correctness, because about two thirds of the way through, for some reason, the album decides it’s not going to be a nu metal album anymore, and that it’s going to finish off as weak, cheap alt. metal and alt. rock. Just great. And even though the lyrics aren’t as aggressively atrocious or cornily delivered on this latter portion of the album, it’s worse because now the only worthwhile aspect of the album (the crunchy nu metal groove) has exited the stage at this point. And “Feel the Way I Feel” is probably one of the shittiest alt. rock ballads I’ve heard in a while. The alt metal caricature “Position One” doesn’t follow it up much better, with an annoyingly repetitive chorus and nothing else to remember it by. And then “Paralyzed” ends the last quarter of the album on the most anticlimactic of notes, a semi-ballad-y alt. metal song that sounds like a prototypic AI wrote the whole thing based on the preceding tracks.

The introductory track, “Empty Batteries” kicks in with a sick, fast palm-muted groove that really got my hopes up for the first minute of the album, but it didn’t take long for the chorus’ lame-ass melody to bring all those hopes to rubble. And it’s pretty much the case for the rest of the front half of the album as well: a few tight guitar grooves kind of trying to keep the album’s head above water, with the vocal performances and lyrics determined to sink the whole thing to the bottom. “Chaos and Earthquakes” and “Passive Aggressive” both take shallow, whiny non-stances on the current political climate, not well disguised by the Eminem impersonating on their verses. The vocal performance on the chorus of “Fix This” is generic as hell and the transition moment between the verses and it sounds off-key and should have been fixed.

“Dodge Your Destiny” is the one moment on the album where the band actually got everything right: no predictable melodic chorus, less amateurish rapping, bearable lyrics, and just straight nu metal aggression with bumping guitar grooves and energetic vocal performances as the focus. It’s the only bright spot on the album, and the album could have been at least respectable if the rest of it was like this. Instead it’s a forgettable slew of alternative metal clichés and strangled nu metal. Nonpoint sounds like they have the equipment to contribute something helpful to get this nu metal comeback everyone’s been talking about now off the ground, but instead they’re scraping the bottom of a well that’s been empty for at least a decade now. I don’t know who the hell still wants to hear this, but I don’t.