If you’re a rock/metal music fan, when was the last time you looked forward to an upcoming album release? The scene got bloated and drunk during the Korn copycat years, and is now seriously hung over and in a funk. When the scene was hot a couple of years back, listeners were making trips to the record store (or more likely, the big chain music superstores) frequently to get their hands on a kick ass new release. Last year, trips to buy new albums became less frequent and more frustrating that in year’s prior.

While there were a few kick ass albums to come out in 2002, most of the newer offerings seemed to fall short. Disturbed’s latest effort, Believe, was the highlight of the year as far as the fresh out of the oven albums are concerned. System of a Down released “Steal This Album” in late 2002, but being unreleased tracks from prior albums, it didn’t seem to generate the kind of excitement that “Toxicity” did when it was released in 2001. It’s a cool album to listen to, but I doubt that it will have the long-term replay factor in your cd player like their previous releases. Mudvayne popped out “The End of All Things To Begin” but it wasn’t as inspiring as “LD50” and lacked that sort of sound that made you want to listen to it again and again. I’m sure there are a few albums that I am missing and someone is gonna let me know that “Crapping on your Mother” or some other underground death metal band is really cool and had a great new album. So be it, but I really don’t actively search for new sounds anymore. If I happen to come across something good by accident (like Flaw), it’s all good.

Rock radio was dominated more by the likes of Creed, Puddle of Mudd (or Muddle of Pudd as I like to call them), and other cookie cutter offerings. I would almost like to call this music “safe metal”. It’s like the bands decide to have some heavy ass guitars to satisfy the listeners who want that kind of stuff and then they go and throw in some bitch songs to satisfy the masses. Sometimes you can listen to the songs but other times you want to throw up in your mouth spontaneously when you hear the first chords chime off of the guitars on your stereo speakers. I’ve had enough Pearl Jam wannabes for the last 10 years and I don’t want anymore. No more “She Fucking Hates Me” on the radio, please. Did you whine like a little bitch “Puddle of Mudd man” when she didn’t fucking hate you?

I’m sure what’s going on right now is the typical cycle that metal/rock seems to get into. The scene gets really hot for a couple of years (maybe longer), gets bloated with shitty bands that start sounding the same, people start rejecting it and it goes into hibernation until the next savior can come and resurrect the scene. Until then, I guess we are forced to pull out the old cd’s in our collection that have gathered dust for a while to give us a little bit of variety from the doldrums of rock.