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Clawfinger: Life will kill you

13/07/07 || Lord K Philipson

It’s a muthafucken wonder that these guys are still around, sticking to their guns like Halford is sticking to cock. Clawfinger had their fame with their huge hit (in Sweden at least) “Nigger” some 500 years ago. They still sound the same, they are still playing semi-heavy, 2 note riffs with Zak Tell’s absolutely abominable rapping vocals on top of it all. It kinda worked in 1993, when it was somewhat a new thing, but this is the god damned year of 2007!

Sigh… Wake up and smell the fucken cocaine, guys!

As always, Zak’s lyrics are borderline amateurish, not to mention goddamn 3rd rate. He’s not exactly going to take home the Nobel Prize for lyric writing, to put it mildly. But that’s how they always were, that’s how Zak always wrote them. And obviously, after 47 albums of the same stuff, he/they still believe it works. It doesn’t. It basically never did.

So, what has happened in the Clawfinger camp since the mentioned “Nigger” single? Basically nothing. The production is a bit more expensive, some of the sounds are no longer Wal-Mart and the guitars are crunchier than ever. But in the end it’s just a very, very watery soup with no substantial ingredients whatsoever.

“Life will kill you” is so full of weak stuff it makes me wanna punch someone. For one, listen to the extremely irritating chorus of the title track. Is that the best a band of “veterans” can come up with? Then we have some fantastically crappy clean sung vocals in the intro to “Final stand”. I don’t know if Zak and the guys are fucken tone deaf, but that shit sounds repulsive. It doesn’t matter that the song sounds like something off a possible Pain album. That’s actually meant as a small compliment. Not that I have many of those for the Clawfingerer’s. The DJ Shadow-esqe intro to “Little baby” is nice, at least until goddamn fucken Zak Tell opens his goddamned fucken mouth again and thus destroys exactly every potential this song could have had. Not even the nice female sung chorus can save this disaster dealing with incestuous events lyricwise. The message is something to applaud, the execution is not.

I could go on like this for every track but I won’t. You already got the concept down. The problem is Zak’s vocals which makes it impossible for me to listen to Clawfinger. They have some catchy riffs and nice electronics, but as soon as Zak opens his yapper – that’s it for me. I’m out like Chuck Liddell against Quentin Jackson. Also, most of the choruses are pretty damn weak when they are intended to be catchy. Not exactly the best way to do things.

I met Jocke of Clawfinger at Roskilde tons of years ago, he was a very cool guy. That fact remains no matter how much I have to struggle to get thru an album with Clawfinger nowadays.

If you wanna know when Clawfinger peaked, put on the tune “Warfair” from their debut “Deaf, dumb, blind”. That’s the only song I need to hear, and own, by Clawfinger. They have proved it once again with “Life will kill you”.

And if life won’t kill me, I’m sure repeated listens to this album will.

3/10.

Information
Released: 2003
Label: Spikefarm
Website: www.clawfinger.net
Band
Zak Tell: vocals
Jocke Skog: keyboards, vocals
Bård Torstensen: guitars
André Skaug: bass
Henka Johansson: drums

Tracklist
01. The price we pay
02. Life will kill you
03. Prisoners
04. Final stand
05. None the wiser
06. Little baby
07. The cure and the poison
08. Where can we go from here
09. It’s your life
10. Falling
11. Carnivore
12. Dying to know (bonus track)
13. Picture perfect skies (bonus track)

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