The Krueggers - Hysterical Cold Side and Dark Memories

Angry Metal Guy 10

Welcome to the new decade, peon! We’re coming out guns blazin’ and we’re gonna need those guns because holy shit, do I have an astronomical piece of garbage for you today! You wouldn’t think it reading the promo sheet, though, which touts ‘heavy-as-balls signature riffs,’ a ‘unique post grunge / nu metal hybrid sound’ and ‘emotionally energetic songs,’ whatever emotionally energetic is supposed to mean. Bipolar, perhaps? Promo sheets are always playing up the hype, but the amount of knob slobbering The Krueggers are afforded practically indicates that upon the first chord every man and woman listening would instantly turn into a shriveled corpse as every drop of their bodily fluids would be violently ejaculated through their nether regions in the form of orgasmic matter. Well, they were close, in the sense that listening to Hysterical Cold Side and Dark Memories¹ just makes me piss blood.

This paragraph is about everything the album does well. The promo came with web-optimized images, saving me a valuable minute of doing the compression myself.

Glad we got that out of the way. Hysterical bravely sets about to chronicle the worst of nu-metal’s many issues and combine them into a nugget so devoid of anything enjoyable it almost wraps back round to depressive suicidal black metal. Just without the black metal. The Krueggers sound like Creed had all their talent sucked away by the aliens from Space Jam, and attempted to recover by listening to Nickelback‘s discography before recording a bunch of songs from Godsmack‘s discard pile. The vocals are the distillate of all the nasal, whiny, faux-emotional tough guys of the early 00’s, complete with the Novocaine enunciation of the laziest grunge. Occasionally you get some second-hand Smashing Pumpkins screams, which are better but still several continents away from good. These do not nearly compensate for the lyrics, of which the cringe is so powerful you will feel it all the way back in 2003, like the embedded track “Freak Out” which was reportedly written in high school despite all band members looking like they push 30. You couldn’t pay me enough to even read what I wrote back in high school, music or otherwise, but these guys went ahead and pushed it as a single for their debut album.

All of the riffs use the same 5 power chords, recombined in different orders, with an occasional pinch harmonic thrown in because they still sound cool, and have you heard of this new band called Machine Head? One of the key differences between nu-metal and other metal is the absence of solos, and the same holds true here, but in this case it’s not for lack of trying. The problem is that on Hysterical, the solos are less ‘free-form melodies displaying guitar playing prowess’ and more ‘play some random notes and go hog wild on your whammy bar and wah-wah pedal’. They are solos as much as crumpling a sheet of paper into a ball is origami. The bass and drums are as basic as they get, even by nu-metal standards, aside from sporadic steel drumming that sounds completely out of place.

Can we at least count on the production not to be diarrhea soup with dingleberry garnish? Not really. Just like the music seems like a distillate of the early aughts, so does the production sound like it was covered in mothballs and left to gather dust for 18 years. The mix is alright, with welcome occasional spotlighting for the bass, but the master is a disaster. It sounds musty and muffled, evoking a moldy attic, and the guitar sound is so stupidly overdriven it constantly seems to bend out of shape.

Here I was, fretting over the future of this enormously fucked planet, thinking we were all gonna die in heatwaves, floods and hurricanes. But no! Along come The Krueggers and this monumental shitstain, this amalgamation of the most whiny, brain dead garbage nu-metal ever procured, out to Sutter Cane mankind into gibbering madness by transporting everyone to some of the worst moments for rock, metal, grunge, and everything related, and turning the quality as low as it will go. Play this on speakers around the world for an entire day and I can tell you right now: global warming will no longer be a problem, because everybody will have killed themselves. Enjoy the next decade.



Rating: 0.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Eclipse Records
Websites: thekrueggers.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/the.krueggers
Releases Worldwide: January 10th, 2020

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