Adrenaline Theory-Reborn

With bands like Meshuggah, Korn, Sepultura, etc., providing off-time stuff for kids to soak up in the 90’s,  CD’s like this are often the result. Good musicians, somewhat interesting songwriting from their standpoint, the thing that gets me about these bands are that the vocalists are interchangeable from band to band.

The pseudo-emotion, the whispered lines, slowly building, repeated four times, into a Phil Ansalmo-esque scream, it just does nothing for me. Don’t get me wrong, the first time I heard Korn I was actually seeing them live, I was an unsuspecting consumer out on a Thursday night in Peoria, Il., and decided to go see Danzig, who had two bands I’d never heard of on tour with him; Korn and Marilyn Manson. I knew that night I was seeing something new, and I knew every kid for the next 10 years would be tying to duplicate the feeling I had that night, and I knew they’d NEVER be able to do it, they could scream their lungs out, buy seven-strings, Line-6 amps, cut the midrange down to zero, and write songs…that miss the point completely.

I could sit here and point out positive things about this album, and they’re there, the obvious things like “the production is ok” or “the tunes were nice and bouncy”, “good drummer”, just to find something nice to say about it, but the truth is, I hate this. I hate the complete lack of originality it represents, I hate the fact that kids in every city really believe they can work their asses off to buy equipment, write songs, keep a band together, book shows, play them, buy more gear, build a fan base, book more shows, play them, only to sound exactly like their heroes, and expect a label to pick them up and spend big bucks to put them out there!?!?!?!?!?! If they’d used that energy and dug down deep the way their heroes did to find something original they’d be huge today, and people like me wouldn’t be struggling, looking outside the US, to find metal bands worth spending our money on. Adrenaline Theory was a great example of 4 guys that had all the ingredients, but nothing to set them apart from all the Adrenaline Theories around the country. Every city has one, some have 10.

I had a theory when I started the label that if you took hundreds of groups of 4 kids across the country, gave them instruments and gear, locked them in a garage and came back in one year you’d have something original from every group of 4, but what I’ve found is that you get either Green Day, Korn, or a weird combination of the two, aka screamo. Depressing, since I’ve got the resources to break a band globally now in the metal genre, but it appears metal died due to starvation from originality. 

I was writing this while listening, then song 5 came on, a…….rap song. I’m out.