Papa Roach - Who Do You Trust?

I wasn’t really looking forward to this album, having never really been a fan of the band, but Papa Roach really blew me out of the water with this one, because I didn’t expect this album to be quite so breathtakingly horrible.

I’m certainly not the type of person to take enjoyment in just insulting an artist’s work without making an effort to be constructive in the process, and I’m definitely not the type to try to elevate myself through pompous dismissal of a piece of art either. But what Papa Roach deliver on this album needs a lot of reproach in my eyes, and it’s possible that my honest opinions aren’t going to go down easily, but I will try to address what I think makes this album so worth such harsh assessment in a way that’s not just insulting (though it may be hard not to express my honest disdain for the music in question, a suppression of which wouldn’t be honest).

I can’t say I know much about Papa Roach; I never liked their stuff when I was younger (and this album makes be look back on my adolescent self proudly for once), so I don’t really know how to contextualize this album or explain it in terms of how they got here in their career. I didn’t listen to their 2017 album, Crooked Teeth, (and this album has not made me eager to go hear that one), so I don’t know how long they’ve sounded like this, but even the mere 38 minutes of music that comprises this album is too much. The band manages to sound both dated as hell with the kind of minimal bravado and absent lyricism of their old-school style of rap metal as well as lazily trendy and gross.

Papa Roach very efficiently reminded me of why I’ve avoided them completely since they came up from their one shit song that became a hit before being relegated to it’s rightful place as a meme. With some of the least convincing and least meaningful rap rock I’ve heard in a long time messily interspersed throughout readily apparent pop cash grabs laden with the contrived “whoas” that have been way too prevalent in rock-flavored pop for the past few years.

Papa Roach really tried to have their cake and eat it too by cramming cheap pandering to their old rap metal roots on songs like “Renegade Music” and “I Suffer Well” in between top 40-esque songs like “Elevate” and “Problems” that channel fucking Imagine Dragons in such an obviously try-hard gasp for maintained relevance. I don’t perpetuate the hyperbolic public consensus that everything Imagine Dragons touches is hot garbage. When it comes to pop music with rock flair, they have their fleeting moments amid their otherwise largely overblown and sickly overproduced arena melodrama that raises them momentarily over the low bar they have to surmount. But what they and their unavoidable Nickelback-esque presence have come to represent and perhaps unintentionally drive other bands to do is what I think makes the frustration surrounding them justified, and this album is a shining example of just that. It’s a poorly calculated disaster of half-assed, lyrically deficient retro rap rock whose evident laziness soils the nostalgia trip it tries to send us on, while the pop-radio elements laced throughout both provide a similarly unflattering display of the current state of rock-tinged pop music right now as well as contradict the throw-back to the early 2000′s they’re kind of trying to make. The band aren’t trying to be diverse, they’re clearly just trying to cover their bases as thinly as possible, and through that thin covering, the band’s (and/or label’s) solely monetary motives can be seen as plain as day.

Just like Black Veil Brides last year, Who Do You Trust? is an early contender for the worst album of the year this year. This one doesn’t feel quite as unbeatable as Vale was last year, but I am not looking forward to whatever album this year potentially pushes this one out of the shit seat, because an album that can do that will certainly be a train wreck to behold.

Even your local youth pastor hates this/10