Old Nü Metal

No folks, this blog's not dead just yet, just been too busy juggling two jobs along with all the other miserable shit in life to get around to this forgotten corner of the web. Oddly, been listening to a lot of music as of late so hopefully there will be some regularity/frequency to forthcoming posts. Regardless, let's jump into the time machine back to the early years of the new millennium where 90% of bands that could have simply gone the way of radio-friendly alternative rock simply downtuned their instruments, added some quasi-witty white-boy rap lyrics and tagged themselves nü metal. Cincinnatti, OH's V-Mob (or V-MOB depending on which website you visit) was birthed in 1997 and released a few demos, ep's and samplers before calling it a day with 2002's Equilibrium mini-album. While it's a huge jump in quality from their rather unlistenable demo from five years earlier, I'm simply not terribly wowed by it. Case in point, the opener "Transparent" (arguably the best song on the record) sounds like a weird remix of Slipknot ("Sic"), Korn ("Need To") and Phunk Junkeez ("Snapped") songs from years before. I guess there was just such a ridiculous demand for this stuff back then that no one called 'em out (or cared). "Mime" is pretty good but devolves into a weird Vanilla Ice-ish bridge at one point which just sounds funny and "Reflection" opens pretty strong. Evidently Equilibrium got the band a legit record contract which they never signed, fired their lead singer, and promptly faded into obscurity. The band has since been compared to Slipknot, I'm not sure if that's due to their very similar sound or the fact that they come from Ohio and people are just confusing that with Iowa (shit, they're basically the same state) but it's probably better than the band deserves. There seems to be a rather strong cult following for V-Mob and the guys have done some reunion shows through the decades but maybe I just missed the bus or by 2002 simply didn't care about the genre any more. Come to think of it I can't remember anything i was doing in '02 so whatever. Long story short, if you're craving some obscure nü metal then you can't go wrong with these 20 minutes. Enjoy.

Snitches Are a Dying Breed