Tolerate
This is crunchy guitar work with some straight to the point lyrics – ‘thanks for coming around to fuck up my day.’
Lo-fi production considering it’s before the great radio explosion of nu-metal and a time where it could have been seen as a logical artistic evolution of grunge.
I have strange feelings about rock music – I think all it really needs is simple dynamics, passion, and hooks to be good. Yet very few artists are able to deliver an effective combination of these simple ingredients. I guess simplicity is the hardest thing to get right. Staind do a fantastic job of focusing on simplistic dynamics for a powerful, imediate listening experience tied into their themes of frustration, pain and self-hatred.
The further we drift into modernity where the function of music is to be ‘liked’ the less intensity such as the harsh screams and negativity of this track will find an audience.
There’s an experimentalism too with the spoken word outro.
- Come Again
More harsh fiery guitar work at play. And some great almost Novoselic like bubbly yet simplistic bass work to boot!
The guitars are thrashy and the combination forms a cathartic release that is as necessary in 2015 as I imagine it must have been in 1996.
- Break
Listening to this album makes me sad to think they abandoned this edgey style entirely in favour of stripped down ballads.
There are melodic moments in this as a brief respite from the guitar based ferocity. Some excellent use of guitar textures here and spoken word mutterings behind the chaos. This is a band in full control of an onslaught of sound that might not be pushing any boundaries, but it’s certainly as earnest an expression of rage I’ve ever heard put to tape.
- Painful
We’ve all experienced pain in one form or another, be it emotional, physical or even vicariously the pain of others few movies, books and songs like this.
The guitar work sure does a good job of setting the tone.
I miss the days before techno utopia where you could say ‘fuck you!’ without having to worry or not whether the statement would get a certain number of likes.
- Nameless
Hard not to think of that Nirvana track – Endless Nameless here. I’m guessing Cobain would have been pretty disturbed that he more or less created this genre of maintream rage rock and tracks such as ‘You Know You’re Right’ and ‘Endless Nameless’ and ‘All Apologies’ ended up defining about 10 years of mainstream US rock.
It’s difficult to argue against the tide of music historians painting Cobain as a the patron saint of rock in opposition to nu-metal as some sort of symbol of decadence.
A band like Staind has the one thing Nirvana lacked and that was a sense of humour. It’s elevated comic book anger, and neither the listener nor the performer sees it as anything more than a bit of escapist fun.
In fact, some of the greatest Nirvana tracks (school, breed, and territorial pissings) were also extremely fun, it’s just the band came to represent music as an embodiment of human suffering and death which became well, kind of a drag.
- See Through
The squalling guitar work sounds almost like a chirping bird in conversation with the anguished vocal performance.
The drumming here is some of the finest on the album with a thunderous quality almost overwhelming to the point it comes as a relief when the track switches gears in the final third.
- Question?
After perhaps the most inventive track on the album the band chooses to regress both musically and emotionally, but I don’t mean that as a criticism because this blsast of angst is one of the most cathartic and enjoyable on the album thus far.
The track chugs forward like a symbiotic beast and there’s an animalistic primal sense of anger conveyed here.
This is a track to trash your room to, to tear up sheets of paper or kick random objects that might be strewn all over the floor. I literally feel like picking up an empty plastic bottle that’s next to me and hurling it onto the ground as I type this and it’s taking an effort of will to hold back that urge.
- No One’s Kind
A title with a double meaning. True, no one is kind and I’m no one’s kind. The alienation of modern society that make just shutting down and giving up seem like a romantic goal rather than an admission of defeat.
And yet we continue to strive for something I’m not quite sure what, like an irked pig jumping over and over into a brick wall and forgetting the cause of the pain to begin with. And this is one of the reasons why nu-metal is such an effective genre, it’s not music about the cause of pain, it’s not a psychological study – it’s a mode of getting the crazies out of the performers and then the listener through catharsis.
In 2015 we just have to sit in Starbucks listening to the pleasant strums of folk music and smiling like the docile creatures we are, hopefully forgetting the price we paid to be castrate ourselves. Just buy something else to forget about or pretend that things aren’t all going down, that things aren’t only going to get worse.
But back in 1996 the freedom of expression was liberating and I get a sense of that freedom just listening to this wonderful exercise in emoting passionate human feelng.
- Self-Destruct
Some excellent bass work here – and the angular style seems a percusor for the kind of music Slipknot would define and then take to the next level.
Who can’t relate to these lyrics – ‘I will self-destruct’
Some people define self-destruction as losing control – not me. I feel self-destruction is a relief from the feeling that there is no control. The one thing I can take control of is how to ruin my life. I don’t have control of things that go well, of how well things will go. That’s why letting go and taking the dark path and be such a relief in a way. And the voices inside my head never go away entirely. I live with what could be described as a small creature that tells me sometimes to go all the way down.
But there are moments where everything feels fine, and everything IS fine. Whatever goes on in your head is just a narrative disconnected to reality entirely. The more I realise that the workings of my brain mean nothing and that action is what it’s important the more I can live my life with dignity and hopefully someday, happiness.
- Four Walls
Modern man is like a caved beast – that’s the message I feel Staind wanted to convey here. This track could be seen as a prototype for the style they’d later become known for. Yet the style works better in the context of this album as a final lament at the end of a chaotic collection of tracks.
More spoken word mumbling comes into play towards the end here. I always find it amusing when bands let loose a little with their musical formula on the final track on albums, it’s as if they think they’ve already made their point and maybe people who don’t like the band would have turned off and found something else by this point.
When I looked at a 33 minute track part of me wants the band to try to sustain the song for the whole 33 minute period, yet of course I’m aware they won’t.
I was expecting total silence when the song ended at around the 5 minute mark, but Staind went for a sound collage inermixed with ambient drone elements. If this were to play side by side some of the more hip examples of this music, I doubt a many would tell the difference.
Staind produced a phenomenal album of unbridled passion and rage here. It’s not sophisticated, but it is immediate, and enjoyable with the power to jolt you out of whatever pain you might be feeling whilst also forming the perfect soundtrack to it.
This is a 5/5 album.
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