It’s hard to believe, but Papa Roach broke onto the national scene almost ten years ago. It was during the heady days of nu-metal. The rules of rock n’ roll had changed. Guitar solos were replaced by DJ scratching and hip-hop beats. The thin rock hero of yesteryear was replaced with overweight white men with daddy issues. Papa Roach fit the mold beautifully with their breakthrough single “Last Resort.” Frontman Coby Dick was chubby, tattooed, and thoroughly pissed off. He rapped about losing his mother and contemplating suicide. He just wanted someone to tell him he was fine, or barring that, a pack of Twinkies.
Eventually the nu-metal bubble burst. Many of the bands faded from view, but like their namesake, Papa Roach refuses to go away. Metamorphosis is the perfect title for the album. The nu-metal band of the early 2000s is long gone, replaced by modern sleaze cock-rockers. Coby Dick is now Jacoby Shaddix, a lean dirtbag with a mop of Sid Vicious spikes. They hinted at the change with 2006’s The Paramour Sessions, but after touring with Mötley Crüe last summer, the transformation is complete.
The Crüe influence is obvious from the beginning. The album kicks off with the instrumental “Days of War,” before mutating into “Change or Die,” a song about defying authority and fighting the status quo. Gee, haven’t we heard this before? Metamorphosis is every bad cock rock cliché distilled into one overproduced, glossy package. Everything on this record has been done before, with much better results.
The music is inoffensive. It’s nothing but bland guitar riffs, cheesy siren sound effects and crashing drums. Jacoby Shaddix is Papa Roach’s Achilles Heel. He’s got charisma, but the lyrics that spew from his profane mouth are ridiculous. They are cliché, but cliché is a big part of hard rock, so that’s excusable. It’s all about how you use the cliché. For instance, “Hollywood Whore” is a fantastic premise that can go so many different ways. It can be a celebration of whores (they wear skimpy outfits, have gigantic funbags and put out for money), or a condemnation of whores (they show off their gigantic funbags too frequently, are possibly addicted to meth and put out for money). A talented sleaze merchant like Andy McCoy or Nikki Sixx could do wonders with that premise. Jacoby Shaddix settles for two-cent rhymes like “Hollywood whore/passed out on the floor.”
Papa Roach suffers the same affliction that all modern hard rockers do. They read all about the exploits of Mötley and their ilk, and are hell-bent on recreating that lifestyle. They automatically put themselves in a corner, because that era can never be recreated. When Nikki Sixx wrote “Looks That Kill,” he was living the life he described. Shaddix and his crew haven’t lived that life, they’ve just read about it in The Dirt. As dated as their first record might be in 2009, it was authentic. Jacoby Shaddix can play rock star all he wants, but it’s obvious he’s pretending.