Some people write songs about girls. Others write about love. Some artists even write about cars, money, big-asses (sic) and doing time: but not Cold’s chief songwriter/vocalist Scooter Ward. He writes about unfortunate events that happened to or around him. Cold’ s introscpective new album A Different Kind of Pain runs the gamut of subjects including drugs, rehab, lineup changes, cheating death to name a few.

Oh word?

No big-asses?

Rehab and lineup changes?

Are you even fucking trying anymore?

Their species of torment and tribulation is atavistic, explicated a million fold with the same mechanics and wrought with the same slovenliness as others. Nu Metal peaked in, what, the summer of 2001? There Staind’s 14 Shades of Grey and Tool’s Lateralus were released to glowing hordes eager for another source of pathetic self-expression as ostracized high school sophomores. I know you’ll say otherwise. I know you’ll say that A Different Kind of Pain emerged after Cold was dropped from Geffen after two gold records, Scooter Ward’s sister was diagnosed with cancer, and they were generally despondent, but none of that ever registers on the album. Music is only as good as it tells the story, not the story on which it is based.

So you get another Nu Metal album built on platitudes of despondency, dejection, and disaster, one absolutely bereft of nuance or dynamism. The vocabulary is lifted from the same middle-American, middle class travails and lacks any knowledge of a world beyond their individual struggles, purposely demarcating interpretation. The music? Three chord crunches and crashing cymbals all around, Scooter Ward riding cliché refrains as though they were something to behold—yes, we get it, you “won’t hold on” and it’s the calm that “killed the storm.” Move on. A Different Kind of Pain is so passable on both these fronts that it’s just unusually embarrassing.

For a little while it seemed that the band offered a glint of sophistication with “Stupid Girl” from Year of The Spider. The boys actually roamed with an ease and comfort atypical of the genre, almost (dare I say it?) playing with the music rather than thrusting it upon your ears. Of course it was folly to believe they’d hold the same aesthetic for the rest of the album, much less groom it to reform their overall sound. For a genre so dead its members continue to eat from the Nu Metal carrion to success—Papa Roach’s Getting Away With Murder has gone gold while Staind’s latest debuted at number 2 on the billboard charts. So be it, I don’t judge music as merely a consumer and, sadly, Cold’s latest is nothing but a product of consumerist music at its worst.