CKY "An Answer Can Be Found"

Another week has come and again it’s a week devoid of high profile, notable releases. Well, except for Missy Elliot’s new cd, but it would be impossible for me to give that an impartial review because… well because I hate her. Zero out of five stars is its score, and that’s without me even listening to it. So, digging through the rest of the new releases, I came across CKY. They’ve been grabbing a bit of attention lately, mostly thanks to the fact that the drummer is Jess Margera, big brother to MTV bad boy Bam Margera. CKY is featured heavily on Bam’s popular MTV show “Viva La Bam”. That’s the first place I, along with most people, heard of CKY. I never quite heard enough to get me interested, but when I saw that they had a new album out, I decided to give it a listen.

First of all, I think it’s important for me to say this. I really like this album. I had no expectations one way or the other when I first hit play, but I honestly really like it. That said, this album has one huge, glaring, un-ignorable flaw. It was recorded by robots. Which sounds absurd, but that’s really the perfect way to describe the sound and feel of this album. It’s as if robots decided to try and imitate human heavy rock music. Everything is there, good guitar riffs, great song construction, decent singing. But you have this feeling that something is missing. A certain human element. Sadly, this sounds like a paint by numbers hard rock album. Heavy distorted guitars? Check. Semi-gruff yet pleasant voiced singer? Check. Attitude lyrics infused with enough sensitivity so as not to alienate the female fans? Check. Emotion and feeling? Um… Houston we have a problem.

It usually takes a band ten years before they make this type of an album. You know, once a band had gained a big following and has enough millions of dollars to record in the best studio possible. This is the first album that CKY has put out since being featured on “Viva La Bam”. You’d expect to hear a band full of hunger, energy, and attitude. But instead, it sounds like listening to jaded rockers who had the money to make their music sound incredible by way of great production and recording.

This truly is a good cd. In fact, it’s the best pretend hard rock album I’ve ever heard. This may be one you’d want to sample before buying, it certainly isn’t for everyone. If they could just infuse some sort of feeling and emotion into it, CKY could create some truly great hard rock music.

Two and a half out of Five Stars

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