Crawl to China

It is said that a book should never been judged by its cover. This statement applies to music as well. An uninteresting cover will not appeal to anyone in a music shop unless you already know that you will be looking for that particular shelf and that you don’t care for the cover. Around 1997 there was already digital technology enough to design cool artworks and covers. If you see Crawl to China in a retailer, do you really think anyone would pick it up? I seriously doubt it, especially considering the abomination that is behind it. This is the worst Tourniquet cover ever and along with ‘Load’ by Metallica, Korn’s covers and thousands others was a waste of paper and trees.

Did I just say ‘abomination’? Humm, I don’t think that is enough, I prefer ABORTION. I mean, we all know all bands have their bad moments. Some reviewer said (can’t recall for what album or band): ‘let’s face it, bad records just happen’ and damn was he right! Metallica has ‘St. Anger’, Megadeth has ‘Risk’, Stryper has ‘Reborn’, Bride has…well, a lot of shitty records around the end of the 90s, Guardian has ‘Bottle rocket’, etc. but this is nothing but utter defecation. I listened to this bastard album only one when it came out (that was 13 years ago) and I haven’t needed to even try to listen it since then. It was so disgusting that I feel vomiting if I think of trying to listen to even one song.

I have always said that evolution is part of nature. Bands have to evolve and adequate to times but put out absolute shit is not evolution, is self destruction. Let’s elaborate: Tourniquet, since ‘Stop bleeding’ has been changing and that is ok, ‘Stop’, ‘Psycho’, ‘Pathogenic’ were more than good albums with excellent thrash tunes and atmospheres. ‘Vanishing lessons’ was the first brick falling over where they turned to more hardcore-hard rock styled song writing and influences. ‘Crawl to China’ was the culmination of ‘run-out of ideas’ by Kirkpatrick and without a good guitar player this was just the push to the precipice. What a way to erase a good career as a speed/thrash metal band.

I am not judging the album itself being from a thrash band. I am judging as a hard rock, alternative rock or whatever shit you want to box it in. If we talk about hard rock then this is miles…ages behind Shakra, Gotthard, Jaded Heart, Final Frontier, etc. There are not catchy tunes, no intelligent song writing, no provoking lyrics, no interesting tunes, and no cool riffs. It is just a black hole in their career. They realized their mistake and they HAD to go back to old style with their next album (although they lost the magic anyway) but this simply didn’t work. Some alternative influences are thrown in the mix because of the tendencies of those years and some grunge perhaps, (YES GRUNGE my fellow reviewers). This is some fusion that simply screwed completely an already bad-shit album. I can’t even imagine Bill Metoyer letting his name to be put on this bullshit.

I haven’t even described any song. The other guys just did it and there is no time valuable enough to waste on such description from my part. You can easily download any song on youtube and you will listen to what I am talking about. Don’t waste your precious time listening to this….to this… I don’t even know what to call it, I ran out of pejorative words. I know: this motherfucking stupidity of so called album. Tourniquet had to crawl to get fans back.