Think Drowning Pool and you think of one song. Bodies is great to get hammered to, but that was 15 years ago, and now they’re five albums down the line and still trying to find another song of that magnitude in the maze of wrestlemetal chuggery.
With guitars stripped straight out of All Hope Is Gone, Hellelujah is an antagonistic stick-it-to-the-man record that tries its best to stir something inside you. Through the power of repetition, vocalist Jasen Moreno powers through some of the most basic chorus lines so far this year, like ‘We are the Devil and life is hell’ and ‘We’re all sinners on All Saints Day’.
It’s so formulaic, but if Drowning Pool released a Keats-esque epic it would feel as out of place as Donald Trump’s hair. No, they’re not musical geniuses but that’s not what you go to a DP record for.
There are a few hidden earworms that can’t be washed away easily, but that said, the obligatory ballad Another Name (complete with ‘La la la la’s) is torturous.
