Bloodsimple

Bloodsimple

Red Harvest

[2/5]

Limp Bizkit used the Doors’ “The End” as entrance music during their first tour, lending their shows a short-lived sense of cinematic foreboding. Bloodsimple invoke the same song during “Ride With Me,” the first cut from Red Harvest, and again it provides unearned atmosphere. Bloodsimple preserve this tune’s violent-rant aesthetic throughout the record, with a frothing Tim Williams attempting Jim Morrison-style spoken tangents (“I take my first taste of freedom/I’ve never felt so alive”). When singing, the former Vision Of Disorder vocalist alternates between an evil-minion whine and a choppy cadence (at best, think Static-X; at worst, as during “Dead Man Walking,” Drowning Pool). Several tracks begin with intriguing leads, which degenerate into generic breakdown riffs. By the time Red Harvest closes with a power ballad (“Truth”) and a half-baked chug-and-chant number (“Numina Ifuscata”), all but nü-metal nostalgists will feel like Morrison’s Oedipal avenger-lost in a wilderness of pain. (WARNER BROS.) Andrew Miller

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