Album Review by Mark Bayross
If you can’t trust those nice people at Kerrang! magazine to fill a couple of CDs with a healthy dose of wall-to-wall rock, then who can you trust? HIGH VOLTAGE succeeds in spades, with a massive 44 tracks, representing – much like the magazine – the diverse sounds that musicians are wringing out of their guitars these days.
All bases are pretty much covered here: polished nu-metal (Linkin Park’s SOMEWHERE I BELONG, Taproot’s POEM); grimy garage rock (The D4’s LADIES MAN, The Eighties Matchbox B-Line Disaster’s CHICKEN); emo-hardcore (Glassjaw’s APE DOS MIL, Finch’s LETTERS TO YOU); and the pulverising industrial stomp of Marilyn Manson’s (m)OBSCENE.
Add to that plenty of stadium rock from the likes of Silverchair, Feeder and The Wildhearts, while left-field thrills are provided by Japanese techno-punks Mad Capsule Markets, faintly ridiculous death metallers Cradle Of Filth, aggro merchants Killswitch Engage and Mike Patton’s current sonic insanity project Tomahawk.
Throw some hip-hop into the mix with The Transplants’ catchy-as-hell DIAMONDS AND GUNS, or bonkers ska, courtesy of Reel Big Fish, or eyeliner (step forward goth-punkers AFI with GIRLS NOT GREY and HIM with BURIED ALIVE BY LOVE), and you have an album with as much variety as quality.
Alongside established acts like Queens Of The Stone Age, (hed) Planet Earth and Stone Sour are a wealth of next-big-thing talent, most of whom are already breaking through (Turbonegro, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Darkness, Cave In, The Donnas, The Used, InMe), and while the inclusion of Andrew WK, Good Charlotte and the terminally dull Stereophonics may be questionable, there’s always the skip button.
HIGH VOLTAGE is about as comprehensive as you can get: 2½ hours of quality tracks (most of which have been singles) that cover just about every type of rock music around at the moment, even, in the case of the Stereophonics, the rubbish type.
Go on, discover your favourite new band…
