Sometimes nostalgia can be something truly wonderful but on the other hand it can be incredibly deceptive and downright nasty. With Limp Bizkit being one of the bands that played a big part in my early teenage years I was curious to see how this, their first record in six years sounded. However rather than being transported to times gone by I was confronted by a lump of nu metal mess that is as septic as its awful cover art.
Other than a couple of minimalistic flourishes from drummer John Otto and DJ Lethal coupled with some ok guitar tones and riffs there really isnt much to like about this album at all. Musically its very straight forward, formulaic and stock. Granted its not as glossed over and hip hop orientated as previous albums Significant Other and Chocolate Starfish but everything on this album has been done to death by the band already. Instrumentally it really is another desperate trip back to the well to get old fans back on board, however the pungent whiff of desperation emitting from the instrumentation on Gold Cobra plays a very minor part in comparison to what can only be described as the Fred Durst show.
As a man now in his forties you would imagine frontman Fred Durst would have perhaps grown as a lyricist and as a person, but as Gold Cobra shows Durst seems to be regressing even further the older he gets. Its bad enough that the deluded king of the wiggas is still beating audiences over the head with the same old tired angry frat boy douche bag schtick but on this album he is single handedly responsible for some of the worst song writing I have ever encountered. The whickety whack wordsmith drops some real bombshells in tracks like “Get A Life” where amongst repeatedly reminding us he dosent give a fuck he enlightens us with the knowledge that he “dosent ride in limos. coz limo’s make me car sick. I aint going out like some dancing with the stars shit”. But thats just the tip of the iceberg, the deeper you go and the longer you listen the worse it gets. The whole album is built on the base of such terrible and turgid rhymes most of which propel Durst’s nauseating narcism and overbearing obsession with people disliking him. Gold Cobra does him no favours, in fact its just going to justify the reasons to dislike him even more. As a whole the guilty pleasure of liking Limp Bizkit has completely evaporated on this album, the care free fun factor is long gone and all thats left is an empty shallow vessel for a which a desperate and tragically sad Durst is using to cling onto whatever remains of a music career.
2/10
