Every Man For Himself -Hoobastank

Mon 19th Jun, 2006 in Music Reviews

Doug Robb lead singer of American hard rock band Hoobastank (famous / infamous for the hit ‘The Reason’) said recently in an interview with Drumline Media that playing in Hoobastank wasn’t as fun as it used to be. No wonder: since their self-titled album came out in 2002, Hoobastank have rarely dealt with anything more than heavy-handed, radio-friendly, lightweight hard rock. Despite this, their first two albums, the self-titled and The Reason (birthplace of that hit you’ve heard ten thousand times) did deal out the ocassional good hook and rock throwback amongst lumpy, otherwise generic and derivative music.

So, what’s so special about Every Man For Himself that the band felt the need to release it in two different cover colours and try their hand at reinvention?  That’s right – Doug Robb and his three – whoops, two – band buddies have actually tried to shake off the dregs of Incubus-influenced rock, so much so that Every Man For Himself should be a strike of genius on the spot.

Sadly, you can’t really call the group’s third outing a ‘comeback,’ or, for better choice of word, improvement of any kind: the honey-like production mixture that is thrown on these thirteen tracks is often sickening.  As if conquering the Australian Top Ten wasn’t enough for this humble American band, they’ve given birth to a set of ‘baby Reasons’ all at the same time.

But the production and the sheen don’t make up half the problem: the electronic whistles and tingles that start  Every Man For Himself are a positive note, and cement the album for potential listeners. But the drawback, and this has and probably always will be the drawback, is that Doug Robb’s passionate voice can’t get away with delivering basic and cliched lyrics. Sure, they borrow from Franz Ferdinand’s techno retro-rock: why not mention evil and a heathen or something radical like that? But Robb’s vocals remain painfully the same, expressing sexual frustration over swirling blips of synth.  Take a look at empty first single ‘If I Were You’, which has a tempo marking that’s so slow and boring it makes Limp Bizkit’s ‘Behind Blue Eyes’ look like the most raring-to-go slice of sizzling action in the world:

‘If I Were You,
Holding the world right in my hands
The first thing I’d do
Is thank the stars for all that I have’

Why, thank you, Doug.  When we bought this Hoobastank album, we were expecting a good dose of mindless hard rock; we didn’t quite know we were going to get therapy with it too. Check out also, the charmingly cute ‘intro’ to the disc, ‘The Rules’: with a crack commando shouting at his troops, which later becomes the material for a song, ‘Born to Lead’, chances are you’ve never heard anything this corny in recent memory.

‘Moving Forward’ sounds like a gouge at Queen falsettos and falls far short of anything the latter could put out, and ‘Look Where We Are’ can’t, unfortunately, sustain its nifty bluesy riff.

Still, there are some good moments in this change of mind for the trio: ‘If Only’ cycles up a soaring solo and a handful of real emotion (although it’s nothing Yellowcard haven’t done roughly a thousand times before except with strings), and ‘Inside Of You’ has an edge to it that is realised after a couple of listens.

Still, it’s depressing to see Hoobastank became a new add to the list of new new-wave rock converts. In the past, they were barely able to overcome their terrible name with some decent energy; now, there’s even less going for them and Every Man For Himself’s rather dull tunes.

(But, if you want to, there’s the option of proving me wrong by also collecting the green-coloured edition of this CD as well as the red one – it comes with zero new tracks and no bonus features, but having something in green and red is just so hot right now.)