VINNIE PAUL RETROSPECTIVE VI - Damageplan "New Found Power"
NEW FOUND POWER (2004) ***
"New Found Power" has always felt like a record that needs serious editing. I understand why the Abbot brothers might have wanted to put out as much material as they could after their forced hiatus in the early 2000's, and looking back with tragic hindsight it meant they got as much of Dimebag Darrel's last recordings onto an album as they could. Who am I now to look such a gift horse in the mouth?
2004 was a weird time for music in general, but especially for my listening habits. I was feeling increasingly isolated as I pushed farther and farther to find the most outsider, technically proficient crap I could, then sample it to make GV Crew songs on the Playstation 1. (Told you it was weird.) Metal, in particular the (only sort-of) "radio-ready" kind like Damageplan was slinging, was not what I wanted to hear. I was sick of the genre, kinda felt like it had sold out (because I was 22 and I still cared about shit like that) and wasn't about to give this the time of day. So yeah, I felt guilty about not listening to it until after Dimebag was assassinated.
2005 happened to be the year I started getting back into metal, though more toward the end. So even when I first heard "New Found Power", it was at the tail end of my "music has to be new, exciting and too esoteric for the normies" phase. Still, I liked it better on the first few listens than I do 13 years later. It hasn't aged well, owing to simplicity and repetition, musically and lyrically.
That being said, there are some pretty rad things happening on this album as well. Vinnie Paul is making the best of this mid-paced material, shredding it up and down and turning some bog-standard songs into really exciting rides. The title track, "Fuck You" and "Cold Blooded" have some incredibly tasty patterns and are worth the price of admission as a result.
The album's apex however, is "Pride", the single the band is most remembered for. "Pride" is the perfect example of a 90's as fuck radio hit. (It came out in 2004, but shhhh.) It has weird guitar thing to open, quiet LOUD quiet with percussive, palm muted mid-section and a grungier outro.
There's some painfully generic broey moments on this album though: "Wake Up" is kind of pitiful in how it says "You think you're better than me? NUH UHHH!!!!" over and over again. Then "Reborn" has to damn near top it by not just saying "You wanna piece of me? Come get some!", but singing it. It's a lyric you'd think could only be spat out through bad cop vocals, but here we are.
"Explode" is a weird attempt at being a more agro Gravity Kills, having a digital hi-hat ticking away but no other synthetic elements. It sounds wrong somehow, leaving the space it generates feeling awkward instead of menacing, like someone's forgetting to play something. "Save Me" has generic lyrics too, but at least it's a decent song. It's got distinct parts, the vocal performance is really good and the heavy part at the end is like somebody replaced Motley Crue's heroin with steroids.
I'm on the fence about "Crawl". It's not a bad song, but it's got a flat, basic-ass intro that makes you check out before bringing in thrash for the verses, then an extended mid-section that wouldn't have been out of place on a Machine Head record from 1999-2001. The lyrics are still broey, "Try and break me you can't; Pick my teeth back up and Crawl" is the back half of the chorus. I dunno; it's okay.
"Blink Of An Eye" is a song I didn't like when I first heard it. It sounds like a bad White Zombie knock-off that bleeds into some alterna-garbage verses that don't have any distinction to them. It's got kind of a neat chorus, but that's not enough to save it. Then the mid section swaggers in with a bluesy sashay and lifts the proceedings up to just good enough to make the cut. "Blunt Force Trauma" is the second most boring song on the album, sounding like a more melodic and power-chorded retread of "Reborn". It's not much to write home about.
You'll probably notice that I'm not talking about Dimebag's solos much on this, his final work. They're there; in spite of Metallica forsaking them the year before on "St. Anger", Dime is soloing on just about every song, or at least lacing it with a lead. But apart from "Pride" and maybe a few interesting sonic textures like the opening of "Blink Of An Eye", he's not really in top form here. He's not bad either, but he's just kinda...there.
"Moment Of Truth" is the moment when you wonder to yourself if you've got enough metal fan left in you to, on track 13, sit through a seven minute Damageplan song. And it grinds. At close to 60bpm. If not for Pat Lachman proving with soulful belting that he's a better vocalist than anybody gives him credit for, this would be insufferable. His singing is the only thing that happens. For seven minutes. The solo is okay, I guess, but...It's a seven minute Damageplan song, dude. Actually it's worse: It's a seven minute Damageplan song because they took a different Damageplan song and slowed it down in Audacity.
The album closes with "Soul Bleed", featuring good friend of the band Zakk Wylde. It's a full acoustic number, no drums and some strings for texture (which are real, according to the Wiki). It's solid enough for what it is: an Alice In Chains Unplugged knock-off. But as far as those go, this is pretty decent. (Ironically enough, Jerry Cantrell was on the Japanese bonus track, a song called "Ashes To Ashes" which I didn't know existed until just now. It's...fine.)
To anyone who doesn't like "Reinventing The Steel", just imagine this album with Phil Anselmo on it instead and feel the cold sweat of dread at what could've been. Because this is pretty much what you would've got if Pantera had stayed together. This was their trajectory. Vinnie and Dime knew the times were changing, and they tried to adapt. The results haven't aged spectacularly, and we may never truly know what they would have done next because of what happened. Then again, Vinnie Paul said from 2005 on that there was another Damageplan album recorded and that Darrel had finished and signed off on all his parts. He even brought it up again last year in an interview. So who knows? As for "New Found Power", it's a bit of a relic of its time, but it has enough interesting twists and turns to make it worth checking out.
White Zombie as one of the few Metal bands in the 90's that both my brother and I could agree on, I listened to them allot! Thanks for the review Nick, I would not sampled this stuff or have given this band a try otherwise.
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