Originally written by Matt Longo
There are a few moments from my formative teenage metal years that particularly stand out. I can recall my first positive assertion of a “great” concept album in Operation: Mindcrime; There was one awesome Friday night spent jamming Images and Words on my Sega CD because it was the only disc player in the house; and despite enjoying The Truth Hurts, I remember feeling confident trading my hastily purchased copy of Pro-Pain’s s/t album for the still-rather-obscure Songs for Insects by Thought Industry. But I wasn’t much of a highfalutin prog douche; shoot, I’d be lying if I said the mid-‘90s weren’t spent on more than a few flirtatious trysts with rap metal. Yup, it started with Rage Against the Machine and ended with Kid Rock, but dudes, those were a bumpy five years in between.
Parallels between rap and metal existed solely in the middling minds and hungry wallets of record executives from decades past, seeing only bottom lines and label rosters, combing a common denominator from the most tenuous of connections. This is how soundtracks like Judgement Night and Demon Knight and Nighty Nacht Nite (?) came to fruition. And major labels like Mercury sought to hop on the bubble before it burst, thus signing a band like downset..
It didn’t work.
And it didn’t work because—despite whatever conviction its members had—rap metal bands consistently lacked chops. Early collaborations like “I’m the Man” and “Walk This Way” were too gimmicky; Biohazard proved less lethal with overexposure; Body Count coasted on heavy initial hype that was unsustainable. For every RATM, you also got scores of bands like Dog Eat Dog and 24-7 Spyz, with eventual mutation into Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit. Any return to the style is steeped solely in ironic nostalgia rather than true reverence—which is where the veil is lifted, the smoke clears, the mirrors shatter. The only genre that arguably imploded faster during that time period was the fucking swing revival. Plus… y’know… this happened.
No one clamors for the return of rap metal. Like the damn-near inexplicable love lately for archaic cassettes, it harks back to a transient period in music that’s now better off dead, and I have no clue who is the audience that downset. thinks they’re playing to. The leadoff title track for One Blood is an apt microcosm of the album at large, as it feebly attempts to recapture some of the fleeting power they must have once felt, as a desperate multi-region-call-to-arms tries to rally the remaining few troops who still answer their strained cries. But the whole present notion of possible resurrected success feels as cobbled together as the first idea of combining-two-types-of-underground-music = dollars. Their own words work against them, as they entreat We’ve done our best / To break down the walls / Only to become a stage for flamboyant demigods / I don’t believe we can / Express our truest moment / Until we embrace / The simplistic nature of our fusion.
That’s kinda sad. It sounds like downset. feel like cheated also-rans, forgotten refugees from a bygone era. They performed what came natural to them, and believed that their passion could drive their success. It’s not like metalheads are resistant to primitive mash-ups from the new guard. How else would Midnight or Toxic Holocaust or Children of Technology exist? Were there no respect for the great old ones, the careers of Overkill, C.O.C., and Grave Digger would be dead and gone. The intangible x-factor is a measure of quality that’s truly difficult to hone in on. The recent releases from the six aforementioned bands all rip pretty fucking hard, but One Blood just honks; actually, it doesn’t even honk… the bloody horn is broken and all it does is wheeze like an end-of-life death rattle.
There is a surprisingly good moment on the album, and that moment is the first solid riff of the (unwittingly titled?) “All I Got”. It’s got heft and swagger, rhythmic variety …and then comes the rest, with even more self-fulfilling prophetic lines like Wherever, whenever this might go wrong / It will never get that bad. Ugh, yes it can, dudes …yes it can. If rap metal’s first wave failings couldn’t keep it above water, then a 21st-century dead-man’s float won’t do much better.
