About 2 months ago I was in Salt Lake City on business. Yes, I do in fact have a real job, as amazing as it sounds. Anyhow, whilst traveling through the land of Mormons, meth abuse PSA’s, and a surprising lack of anything remotely resembling a traditional street name I was subjected to their local rock station. To be sure, it was a shit pile if I ever heard one, but it interestingly had a completely different playlist from the other 90% of rock stations I was subjected to in my home of Florida. So amazed by this phenomena, I actually continued to listen to the station just to see what they would unexpectedly throw at me.

Somewhere between my drive from SLC to Orem, I noticed a very familiar groove metal song structure. Somehow- SOMEHOW- Five Finger Death Punch, easily the closest thing I have ever heard to a homosexual quadriplegic orgy, managed to write a second album of musical dick fencing. Yes that’s right: between finger-banging the audience of pasty female juggalos that listen to “metal” and finding new, inventive ways to enlarge their own musical assholes, Five Finger Death Punch wrote new music. And what’s more astounding is that they got regular play on a substantially successful commercial radio station.

This is tantamount to BET giving ICP legitimate recognition. And it’s one of the worst things in the world because with War Is the Answer the band has demonstrated that they learned nothing from their prior groove abortion.

War Is the Answer is roughly 45 minutes of groove metal merged with elements of metalcore and watered down radio rock in the vein of Skillet. The music is simplistic, generic, and about as individual as the dog shit you find festering in the mid-day sun at the dog park. War Is the Answer is nothing more than a DevilDriver clone channeling Pantera and MachineHead with whatever band of the moment is popular at Hot Topic. In fact, this album is so pitifully inept, it makes DevilDriver look like Unquestionable Presence-era Atheist.

Yes, that’s right. Five Finger Death Punch is so shitty and untalented at their basic, run-of-the-mill, scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel groove metal that they make DevilDriver sound legitimately good. There is high concept gay porn that features regularly heavier music than this attempt at metal.

The guitars are everything you expect from a poorer DevilDriver album mixed with the rejected riffs from an early Shadows Fall effort. The clean vocals come across like every other Clear Channel hard rock act, and the drumming is damn near lethargic. Then you get songs like “My Own Hell” which have these segues and bridges that make absolutely no sense  and do nothing more than to lengthen the song for another 30 or so seconds.

Then there is the cover of “Bad Company”. Oh god. It doesn’t sound like they’re covering “Bad Company”. It sounds like they’re trying to cover Metallica covering “Turn the Page” and “Whiskey in the Jar” mistaking them for “Bad Company”. While drunk and trying to fist Lars Ulrich’s asshole with Rob Trujillo’s entire arm and Hammett’s whole guitar.

War Is the Answer appeals to only the most white trash, pathetic, impoverished shit stains in the US. It’s an album that wants to ooze charisma and machismo but instead comes off like the second string masochist quarterback at a backwoods high school being caught by the town newspaper fucking an overweight homeless man in the shower of the locker room. And the homeless man decided to lube with icy hot, causing the quarterback to thrust in excruciating agony, screaming sweet gay S&M nothings into the previously empty locker room doorway. It’s the kind of album you’d see in frequent rotations in the cd player of a mudding truck owned by a kid wearing fishnet sleeves, Jinco pants, and sporting that unbearably douche-y full-chin goatee you see on nu metal scene kids so much; you know he probably owns 6 multi-colored dildos for his own “experimental” purposes.

It wants to play with the big boys, and goes out of its way to sound tough (just check out the “threats” in the title song), but in the end War Is the Answer is yet another worthless, neutered offering from Five Finger Death Punch.  I find it amazing that these guys didn’t implode, much less get decent exposure on mainstream radio rock stations. I now hate Utah.

Review byNecro-tron