Track Listing
The Ending Renegade Music Not The Only One Who Do You Trust? Elevate Come Around Feels Like Home Problems Top of the World I Suffer Well Maniac Better Than Life When Papa Roach first exploded onto the rock scene in the 90s, I remember I was eager to snap up a copy of their now infamous first album Infest. Along with Linkin Park, these were the first group to really entice me into this style of music as a young teen and expand my musical tastes beyond the pop and hip-hop influences I was accustomed to at the time. Skip forward to 2019 and Papa Roach are still kicking about, albeit with a different tone and feel to their music now. When it comes to Who You Trust, the group’s latest album, all 12 tracks feel tonally inconsistent and musically confused for the duration of its run time. Beginning with the electronic-infused track The Ending, Papa Roach quickly branches out from this nu-metal style to influences of grunge, heavy rock and even metal. Unfortunately the result is more akin to a disjointed puzzle of randomly placed tracks than a surprisingly ingenious combination like pineapple on pizza. In a bid to try to reinvent their sound, Papa Roach cling to a variety of different genres that have echoes of their original sound but nothing that really sticks out and helps the band grow. It’s a real shame too as this band were one of the first rock groups I listened to but their lyrical prowess, hunger and generally hard-hitting melodies are really lacking in their latest album. The biggest stand out of the album is Elevate, for all the wrong reasons. A strange hybrid of hip hop, pop and rock, Elevate fails to garner much enthusiasm for this new sound and from here the album blindly stumbles around different sub-genres and niches of this vast style of music with little luck. Come Around and Feels Like Home feel much closer to Blink 182, I Suffer Well is about as far away from Papa Roach’s style as you could expect and between these two extremes are a selection of tracks that fail to really nail the same star power as Dead Cell and Last Resort. After 12 tracks of alternate styles and influences, Who Do You Trust ends with you feeling more confusion than anything else. Who are Papa Roach? In a bid to try to answer that question themselves, the group try to show their range and diversity whilst failing to keep any consistency in album format. As individual tracks released say 10 years ago, Papa Roach could still be relevant but this doesn’t feel like the same band who begun their journey all those years ago and that’s a real shame.
