It’s OK. You can say you like Papa Roach. Honestly. You might get a few tuts from people whose favourite bands’ logos look like diarrhoea shotgun blasts, but so what?
Born in 1993, the Californian quintet you pretend you don’t like have racked up eight (!) studio albums of varying quality. And you know how it goes by now. One song from a new LP will get moderate US radio airplay, then they’ll spend the next two years being an excellent live act and our memory of that last record will get proper fuzzy.
With LP number nine, ‘Crooked Teeth’, there’s no breakthrough, as such. It probably isn’t going to ignite the airwaves like Papa Roach did with the monster singles from ‘Infest’ at the turn of the millennium.
What it does do, however, is salvage the band’s credibility. Their previous record, ‘F.E.A.R’, was pretty shoddy even by Papa Roach’s fluctuating standards, so another dud could have dropped them to the canvas for good.
In some ways, ‘Crooked Teeth’ gets us all dewy-eyed and ready to don a pair of baggy jeans and procure a wallet chain from…somewhere. Jacoby Shaddix brings back the rapping in a big way, but it doesn’t feel dated like, say, Limp Bizkit’s charmingly silly ‘Gold Cobra’. It’s integrated into the radio-ready alt rock sound the band perfected on ‘Getting Away With Murder’ but have seldom fully committed to since. It almost sounds current.
Papa Roach still refuse to solely hark back to the one era of their sound that made them successful. Rather, they stick their various guises together and hope it’ll be shit-hot. Sometimes it is. Break The Fall’s moody, menacing rap verses are bouncier than a zorbing sumo, for example, and when that chorus hits, it hits.
That’s the kind of immediate, earworm melody the band are known for. It’s brash, it’s ballsy. It’s that sleazy, anthemic, banger-a-minute, old reliable we know as Papa Roach, repackaged so you don’t notice it’s pretty much the same stuff as before.
The record peaks early with its title track, where Jerry Horton’s southern rock-tinged riffs lead to an absolute KO of a refrain. It’s just a beast, and when Horton’s guitar runs up against the drums on the way out of the chorus? Gold. Absolute gold. This song is the best thing Papa Roach have written in, like, a decade. Promise.
Elsewhere, the band’s formula is geared towards radio with varying results. My Medication’s titular hook ends up a bit like SOiL’s Halo, while Born For Greatness’ pitch-shifting perversion is really off-putting amid life-affirming (albeit cheesy) cries of “One life, one chance, start living.”
There’s nothing overtly bad about ‘Crooked Teeth’, but when you’ve got a veteran rock band bringing in Machine Gun Kelly on a track called Sunshine Trailer Park - not a hint of irony present - they do come across like a Brass Eye mock-up of an act scrabbling for relevance.
And they don’t need to. They don’t need to rope in Skylar Grey on Periscope because Shaddix more than carries it on his own. It’s the cadence, the simplicity, the snappy snare that makes it a good pop song, not the addition of a (very very very good) pop vocalist.
Papa Roach's music is for having a good time. They don’t do labyrinthine, multi-faceted opuses like Tool or Opeth. They don’t document elaborate concepts like Cradle of Filth. They just make you want to jump up and down and smile.
People can dick on them for bandwagon-hopping or whatever, but it doesn’t matter when you’ve got Last Resort, To Be Loved, Crash, and a few of these new ones on the setlist. ‘Crooked Teeth’ will pad out the Papa Roach live experience with a few absolute belters, but otherwise it cruises along quite pleasantly for half an hour or so. And that’s fine.
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