Hang loose, Satan.
Some lines from the PopMatters review, unread by millions, of a wanton band of Canadian boredom-rockers:
This album isn’t good by any stretch of the imagination, but then, My Darkest Days don’t really do “imagination.”
MDD’s hook, the thing that sets them apart from similarly industrious Canadian rasp-rock bands Theory of a Deadman and mentors Nickelback, is their embrace of electronic and R&B music. It’s a tentative no-homo embrace, sure, but MDD dabble in textures you might find on darkwave label Metropolis—sinister keyboards and programmed beats against thick walls of guitar, occasionally sounding sort of like the Birthday Massacre. Also they cover Joe’s “Stutter”.
Joe’s original was all stutter, with the beat and Joe and special guest Mystikal caroming off one another, spinning a tangled web of paranoid hypocrisy. MDD just play the song. It’s got a backbeat; they can’t lose it. Scratchy-voiced Matt Walst stutters like he’s reading the stutters off notebook paper. There’s not even a guitar solo, the rock equivalent of a Mystikal verse. These guys are so meat-and-potatoes they sometimes skip the potatoes.
There’s nothing sick or twisted about Sick and Twisted Affair, which manages to make wild sex sound about as wild as carrying seven-dollar beers back from the concession stand.
Most of the songs work grungy variations on Nickel-backbeats. There’s a ballad. I’m sure My Darkest Days tour the seediest underbellies of society guided only by loins and id, but their music sounds like sandpaper—and not the sexy kind!
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