Dope –
Group Therapy
The Hobo Review
Dope formed sometime around the late nineties
in New York City, and since their debut release Debonaire in 1999 the band
has managed to release an EP every year to date. So now comes the bands
5th album, Group Therapy. Although they claim that they ‘had to sell dope’
on the side when first starting up to buy ‘tapes, recording sh#t and equipment,’
I naturally believe none of it, passing it off as an immature little gimmick
and an attempt to resonate with the legions of melodramatic teenagers with
self inflicted pains making their own lives some kind of fraudulent hell.
Anyway, enough politics, lets get to the
music. The track Falling Away acts as your stock standard numetal track,
full of derivative and rehashed guitar work and tired and tried subject
matter. The next track Bitch sports a haunting sample of Aqua’s smash hit
Barbie Girl (yes Greenmuse, I’m scared too.) The song starts off with a
cool little line ‘lets have a bachelor party with chick, and guns, and
booze, and firetrucks’ but its pretty much downhill from there. With lyrics
like ‘one, two f*** you’ it ends up being pretty darn average and echoing
a lot of other songs we’ve all heard before.
I Am is a rather catchy little ditty, but
yet again full of lyrical clichés and lower level musicianship –
‘sometimes I wish we’d agree to disagree,’ ‘f*** you I am what I am.’ The
song Motivation ends up sounding like an early Static X demo whereas Sing
resembles a lethargic pop rock song – almost reminiscent of some of Manson’s
Holy Wood.
Indeed, on the album there are lows and
even lower lows. Paranoia sounds like a sad Mudvayne track ‘its para-f***ing-noia’
whereas Bring It On becomes more of an ultra-imitative boring numetal track.
Another Day represents yet another cheesey soft rock song, Burn bores me
with the hook ‘burn the mutha f***er to the ground.’ The album at least
closes with the slightly catchy prog-metal track Easier.
Dope ends up lying somewhere between Spineshank,
Mudvayne, Korn – and even at times Marilyn Manson. The vast body of tracks
are derivative, but nonetheless catchy – as most numetal bands are. The
band however fails to create a consistent unique sound, switching between
derivative numetal to soft pop/rock several times on the album. The band
is far from compelling, but also far from totally abysmal, they are however
constantly restricted by a gross overuse of the words ‘f***’ ‘mutha f***’
and the uber popular phrase ‘f*** you.’
When I was knee high to a grasshopper,
I quite enjoyed Dope’s fist EP Life. The band however, no longer possesses
the necessary elements of flair or originality to keep me interested for
longer than two minutes. Its not horrible, it’s not good but it lands in
the inscrutable gray mass of painful mediocrity. It won’t change your world,
it won’t depress you to the point of tears, but it’ll leave you teetering
on a level of dull indecision as you fight within yourself to work out
whether your purchase was a total waste of time and currency – or not.
CD Info
Dope –
Group Therapy
Genre: Numetal
For Fans Of:
Static X, Spineshank
Rating: 
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