Originally written by Dan Staige.
Oh please protect our innocent ears! Damage Plan’s New Found Power has every little swear werd erased out in a shotty fucking effort to either make the kids want the “explicit version” or to please the parents of 13 year old music thieves who blatantly violate the clear law of the land by downloading that oh so precious copyrighted material that barely puts food on the table for these struggling musicians! Seriously, what’s the point of this deleting of cusses?
It’s nearly impossible not to make comparisons of Damage Plan to Pantera. One thing I will tell you is this: Even w/ these please-aller vocals on DP, this is still 10 times the album Reinventing the Tin was or ever had the potential to be. That album was a disgrace and a horrible way to end an otherwise respectable & lengthy run as “The Kings of Metal” (rolls eyes). Pantera may have been effective on disc but live they were sloppy drunk egotistical assholes. People paid ungodly amounts to watch them stumble around on stage drunk & high and lose their places in songs and have to start over. This is how the “Kings of Metal” deliver their first rate material? What a joke that was. So maybe it was for the better that their own little world of making gigantic pot leafs, tossing beer on the crowd, and utterly obliterating every hotel room they stayed in on tour has at last come to an abrupt end. By the way, only dumb ozzfest kids thought you were as high and as mighty as you claimed to be.
Supposedly, New Found Power is a completely fresh start for Dime & Vinnie. Efforts to bring back the “power groove” have been effective to an extent. In fact, bass lines are pretty much 100% focused on knuckle-dragging groove and that’s it. What dominates this album is Dime from beginning to end. It’s basically a showcase of what the skills and trademarks he has accumulated over the years. It’s whammy pedal screeching and solid Randall Warhead bottom end chord grooving w/ some flying artificial harmonics that admittedly bring a smile to my face. He employs numerous effects, especially in leadwork. It’s good variety I guess, but it’s basically the shining star in an album that leans in the direction of radio and/or MTV2 airplay. The material is far less of a punch packer than Trendkill for instance. It gets heavy, but only to go to these light and airy whisper spoken breaks, commonly characteristic of nu-metal. Damage Plan is by no means of the nu, but they seem to favor the simpler/more traditional song architecture w/ a thin blanket of “tone down” tossed over the top for acceptance of a broader audience. The album begins its drive w/ modern aggressive hardcore-esque vox. As the album progresses, the vocals get awful. And I mean this in the sense that they turn the music into the “Best of Slaughter”. What was a halfway solid front end has melted into a slushy mess. “Pride” signals the beginning of this descent. While it is a respectable song, it enters into a southern-type feel w/ clean vox and those oh so annoying soft spoken little breathers. The predictability just starts to set in a little by this point. “Fuck You” is a song worthy of replay, even w/ every “FUCK” silenced out. It’s classic Dime rhythm w/ fucking awesome hanging harmonic work. Although I think it’s easy to say who the song was dedicated to, the angsty vox establish the same theme in many of the other pieces. You kind of get the nu feel when you hear “don’t judge me”, “fuck this, fuck that”, “you can’t stop me”, and so on and so forth. “Reborn” is a slow southernish bluesy chugger w/ monster guitar tone and a great solo. But by this time vox have turned more into actual singing than full on aggression. It could be intentional, but it completely changes the feel of the music. To me it softens it. Even though they are prevalent in “Moment of Truth”, I will still admit to loving this song. Extremely slow w/ a killer slide riff to low end palm muted chunks, the backyard barbecue nascar lovin’ vox can’t shake a stick at the power of this song. More of a southern blues/hard rock feel than metal, I still think it’s one of the best songs Dime has written. Ever. “Soul Bleed” ties up the ass end as a hard rock ballad of sorts. Imagine Planet Caravan w/ Layne Staley on vox. Something straight off of AIC’s Jar of Flies that almost sounds like Chris Cornell on backing vox, back from the Badmotorfinger days before he got feminized.
I guess I’ll recommend this to anyone fond of Dime’s work. Try not to think of it as something that’s going to blow Pantera out of the water, because it’s not. It’s a decent album, it’s got thought put into it, but it’s catered a little too much for the larger audience. The vox are nowhere near my liking, they seem to erode from a sequoia trunk to a twig by the time all is said and done. But like I said, that could be intentional and it could be that Damage Plan wants it that way. Dime’s work can still raise an eyebrow or two, regardless of a pretty much lifeless drumming performance by Vinnie and vox that take some getting’ used to. It’s a mostly agreeable heavy rock album w/ obvious blues infusion. A please-aller that has the potential to please a lot of people a lot of the time, just not me.
