Skrape: Drops of Jupiter

In wake of its first full-length studio album, New Killer America, Skrape subscribes to the current trend prevailing within the music industry: tailoring an album with a message consistent with the tastes and interests of a niche audience in the music community.

With 12 nonstop, speaker-shredding tracks, America boasts violent, tumultuous lyrics, adrenaline-inducing guitar riffs and hard-hitting drums. Although "skrape" is not an official word according to Webster's Dictionary, the cover art featuring a microscopically enlarged fingernail symbolizes a burning desire for a nicotine fix. "What You Say" offers little in the way of pleasant-sounding music. It delivers nothing short of insolent noise.

Notwithstanding, "Waste" offsets the repugnant noise characterizing the first track as frontman Billy Keaton, playing on the restrained, unapologetic voice of Chino Moreno of the Deftones, spits out lyrics steeped in sheer violence. "Goodbye" captures Keaton emulating the voice of another band frontman, this time Filter's Richard Patrick in the sterling song "Take My Picture." Unleashing a vicious attack of rigid guitar riffs, spooky keyboard playing and melodic, fast-paced drums,

"Isolated" envelops Keaton empathizing with his niche audience as he laments I feel your pain/I want to crawl through. Undertaking from its inception to inundate the audio faculties with amplified music electronica, "Rise" bears some semblance to what music would sound like if the Nazis had won World War II. The song draws attention to how society is quick to pass judgments based on differences. While remaining entrenched in the omnipresent orgasmic rock musical pattern in which the song erupts into a rising wave of sonic amplified noise, "Broken Knees" is unnecessarily fast-paced and overly glutted with too many sounds.

What at first seemed like an exceptional album turned out to be stale. The first four tracks serve as bait, holding the listener's attention for the other eight. But the rest of the album amounts to fillers. Underpinning and directing this genre of music is an affluent niche audience on whom heavy rock titans depend.