Sauce

The heavier, darker progression from his work with the sorely missed Coal Chamber, one of metal’s most respected and also most maligned personalities, Dez Fafara, is back with a second Devildriver album. The Last Kind Words is eleven tracks of pummeling, low-end grooves. Meat-and-potatoes, gothic-tinged heavy metal, it plays out with a lot of momentum, but, sadly, not much else. It certainly won’t alienate fans of the previous album, but therein lies the problem; in being consistent, it also repeats the faults of the debut.

Fafara’s voice still sounds like he’s been chasing whiskey shots with draino – which, I should point out, I consider a good thing – but on this release, his abrasive roars are dulled by some terminally indistinct guitar work. When he growls “All your hopes and dreams don’t mean shit” in the opening number, the music fails to give such a harsh statement the punch it deserves.

The Last Kind Words isn’t an album without merits. Devildriver were recently immortalised on more than one episode of Scrubs as the driving music of choice for the delivery guy (“do you like speed metal?”), and while I don’t drive myself, I bet this album would make wicked burnout music. But all in all, the worst crime you can commit in music is to be boring, and that’s ultimately what I found The Last Kind Words to be. While it’s looked back on with disdain by many in the metal community for its association with nu-metal, I personally found Farara’s work in Coal Chamber to be a lot more interesting than Devildriver. That, and a lot more memorable. And isn’t that the point?

TOM WILSON