Hollywood Undead – “Notes From The Underground”

LA rap-rock troublemakers Hollywood Undead are one of those bands that have a knack for writing songs that you know deep down you should hate but, for some reason, you just don’t. You may not love them like you loved say Master Of Puppets, but you sure as hell can’t get songs like “Pigskin” out of your head.

Like a teenager wired on a cocktail of ecstasy and Jagermeister, Notes From The Underground is more of the same twitchy, snotty, agitated rap-infused rock that we’ve come to know and love/hate from the Undead gang. Clearly fueled on a lifestyle of (sigh) bitches, drinking, sex, drugs and so on, Notes From The Underground isn’t an album that takes too much effort to listen to.

Then again, not wanting to pigeonhole/stereotype their audience too much, songs like “Another Way Out” are written for an audience who wake up on Monday morning sore as fuck, but with no recollection of the previous three nights’ antics. Songs like “Kill Everyone”, a track full of lyrical gems like “fuck it, let’s kill every one!”, are simply Friday night fight songs for the pre-twenty five brigade so, looking at the album on that basis, there are probably very few forty year old bankers reading this review and thinking “wow, this sounds like my sort of thing.”

Like Limp Bizkit, like Eminem, like Brokencyde, Hollywood Undead write music of the lowest common form so it won’t take too long into opening track “Dead Bite” before you get the general idea as to what these masked hooligans and their anger-fueled rantings are all about. That being the case, it shouldn’t take you too much to decide whether you’re with them or against them.

Track Listing:

01. Dead Bite
02. From The Ground
03. Another Way Out
04. Lion
05. We Are 1
06. Pigskin
07. Rain
08. Kill Everyone
09. Believe
10. Up In Smoke
11. Outside
12. Medicine
13. One More Bottle
14. Delish

Run Time: 50:44
Release Date: January 8, 2013

Check out the song: “We Are”