| Protégées of Fred Durst they may be, but Massachusetts rock quartet Staind owe precious little to the rap-core fusion that lays at the centre of the Limp Bizkit blueprint. Rather, Break The Cycle--Staind's follow-up to their million-shifting major label debut Dysfunction--harks back further into to the alt-rock archive. A catalogue of fraught, heart-on-sleeve angst-rock, it's very quickly evident that Staind's heritage lays in the bruised, sensitive emo-grunge of Alice in Chains and Pearl Jam rather than any of their immediate peers. Trouble is, frontman Aaron Lewis' flat vocal lacks the weathered, pained dimension that all too often lent the Seattle sound its eerie pathos, and his lyrics are at best, functional; "Old man lies in an alleyway dead/ A little girl lost just stands there and cries," suggests the hand-wringing misery-tract of "Open Your Eyes"--a rather artless vision of social decay that never actually concludes anything beyond the fact that poverty, drugs and skipping school are very bad things. By the closing live take of "Outside"--on which Fred Durst crops up, popping on his sensitive cap for a syrupy duet with Lewis--you're left with the overriding feeling that Staind have absolutely nothing meaningful to say about the human condition; something that renders Break The Cycle as little more than an exercise in futility. --Louis Pattison |
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