Full Circle

Album Review

First off, Drowning Pool are docked points for not featuring Jesse Jane on the cover of Full Circle, but then again, the Jenna Jameson wannabe never quite seemed appropriate for Drowning Pool, who never quite seemed to capture the sleazy girlz, girlz, girlz vibe a porn star cover girl lends a band. No, the band returns to a gloomy black-and-white cover photo, as if we've been plunged back into the murkiness of a Saw dungeon, which is a pretty fair representation of the roiling torment of Full Circle. It's an album filled with drop-D tunings and grinding grunge riffs hammered into submission as if they were pure, processed metal. Often, this comes across as a flattened Stone Temple Pilots crossed with Alice in Chains, but instead of being either the unabashed revival of Puddle of Mudd or the lunkheaded arena rock of Nickelback, Drowning Pool concentrate on slick, stylized angst that theoretically could play with teenagers, assuming that they'd be into this music in 2007. The thing about this glossy gloom is that Drowning Pool aren't good at the murk: they're good at the riffs, they're good at piecing together hooks, they're good at the rhythms — all the things that make them sound like a heavy party band.