Five Finger Death Punch - And Justice for None

The Guardian 60

(Eleven Seven)

The Las Vegas quintet Five Finger Death Punch are both one of metal’s biggest bands and simultaneously reviled by metal’s chin-stroking contingent. It’s easy to understand both facts on listening to their seventh album, where they are never knowingly found in pursuit of subtlety. They have, more or less, two songs: the furious and seething uptempo one in which singer Ivan Moody outlines his grievances against the world, and the colossal ballad in which singer Ivan Moody outlines his grievances against the world. There are no tricksy time signatures, no detours into experimentalism – unless you count their moody remake of the Offspring’s Gone Away as an experiment. It’s not in the least subtle and nor is it particularly extreme, but then huge crowds of rowdy teens don’t necessarily want subtle or extreme, even if the chin-strokers do.

Sometimes the raging is so overdone as to be comic, even when Moody is baring his soul. On Sham Pain, he reflects on his troubled past couple of years – rehab, walking out of the band, legal hassles with their old label – with a level of self-pity that wouldn’t disgrace a child who’d been bought Pro Evo instead of Fifa for Christmas: “Everybody seems like they’re waiting for me to die / Talk shit behind my back, can’t look me in the eye.” When, on It Doesn’t Matter, he hollers “You’re so self-righteous, and you’re never going to change,” you want to inquire if Mr Pot and Mr Kettle have made each other’s acquaintance. But the single-mindedness of And Justice for None means it never gets boring. It sticks to the point, it plays to its strengths, and it delivers the requisite thrills. Don’t expect it to appear on year-end lists, and don’t expect the band’s army of fans to care.