Confusion Bay

Personnel: Lars I Lommen Vognstrup (vocals); Lars Christensen (guitar); Jeppe Christensen (keyboards, background vocals); Morten Toft Hansen (drums).
Audio Mixer: Jacob Hansen.
This Danish outfit continues to kick up a thoroughly Americanized ruckus on Confusion Bay, its second album of futuro-metal. Describing Raunchy's material results in inevitable comparisons to other bands, including In Flames ("9 - 5"), a slightly dumbed-down Mudvayne ("Join the Scene," "Show Me Your Real Darkness") and, more obviously, a warmed-over approximation of Fear Factory's industrialized throb'n'crunch, singer Lars Vognstrup (replaced by Kasper Thomsen after the recording of Confusion Bay) doing a spot-on imitation of Burton Bell's growl-to-croon dynamic. While Raunchy's songwriting ethic is solid throughout, the big choruses tend to be overly polished, recurring techno blips and bleeps lend too much fat to the band's meaty guitar-based sound, and, truth be told, Confusion Bay is only vaguely inspiring when it comes to riff and lyric. Maybe it's the band's lack of originality or its painfully lame moniker, but Raunchy adheres to too many dated nu-metal and industrial metal clichés. Fans of such genres who didn't get tired of those sounds in the 1990s might extract more pleasure from Raunchy, who will likely get a shrug of indifference from more selective listeners. ~ John Serba