Album Review

Drowning Pool - ResilienceDrowning Pool – Resilience

Drowning Pool have had the world’s worst luck when it comes to holding onto a front man; original singer Dave Williams tragically passing away from undiagnosed cardiomyopathy in 2002 on the bands tour bus, replacement singer Jason Jones leaving with the explanation reading that he and the band had “irreconcilable differences”, third singer and longest standing vocalist to date original SOiL vocalist Ryan McCombs who did 2 albums with the band (the most any of the predeceasing front men did) left in 2011 to rejoin SOiL after in what I think was a bit of a letdown in the bands self titled album. Now we have Jasen Moreno from the band The Suicide Hook taking over now but whereas McCombs was already a well established singer in his own right I’ve never heard of this new lad or his band so there is the element of complete surprise as to what we can expect from the style of this new record, or whether this one will stick around for long or not.

Now the thing that I notice the most is that they are still pushing their more southern rock style as opposed to their original extremely popular dark metal material but not only that they’ve took the musical styling of “Desensitised” and mixed it with the type of structure of song and some similar sounds to Papa Roach (“One Finger and a Fist” is where I first got that comparative reference from because that really does sound just like something I would expect from Papa Roach) it’s very good stuff I must say but whether the fans that have stood by them for a long time may be disappointed with it due to the sheer difference from all their other albums, I don’t think their last album did as well as the rest have done.

So all in all there is hope for the band yet as they have a strong line up – not as strong as previous ones but not the weakest either – it’s just all dependent on how long this vocalist sticks around for long enough so that the band can re-climb through the ranks to get back the high selling metal machine they once were, I say re-climb but as this material is good and makes for an interesting listen it is not the same high quality sound that they possessed once upon a time, so they still may never get back to that same point.

3.5/5

Review by James Webb

 Band Members

Jasen Moreno
CJ Pierce
Stevie Benton
Mike Luce
 Track Listing
1. Anytime Anyplace
2. Die For Nothing
3. One Finger And A Fist
4. Digging These Holes
5. Saturday Night
6. Low Crawl
7. Life Of Misery
8. Broken Again
9. Understand
10. Bleed With You
11. Skip To The End
12. In Memory Of
13. Blindfold
 Band Related Links
Drowning Pool Facebook
 Review Score Code
- Top Cheese
- Brilliant
- Pretty damn good
- Ok I guess
- What Was That?