Unfortunately for Payable On Death with perfection they have lost the emotional power of their earlier work.



Artist: P.O.D
Album: Testify
Label: Atlantic
Tracks: 13
Running Time: 50 minutes





The bloated corpse of nu-metal has been doing little more than delivering nails to a large and very public genre coffin for near on a decade and P.O.D do not help the cause with Testify.

Their best work was half a career ago with The Fundamental Elements of Southtown, a vital and sonically confronting slab of rap, reggae and metal set against passionate and intelligent lyrics talking of the depression of urban America and how to right the ship. But for three albums now the San Diego rastafied Christians have been playing the same songs with largely the same outcome. And Testify shows that. Their heavy reggae influence finally sounds at ease against the metal riffing but so it should, if you do something for long enough perfection will arrive.

Unfortunately for Payable On Death with perfection they have lost the emotional power of their earlier work and replaced it with smooth vocals, power riffing and the biggest production job of their seven album, 14-year career.

There are rare moments when the songwriting shines through like Sounds Like War but it’s not nearly enough.

Jason Truby sounds at home when he opens the song with a chug-chug-churn riff and Sandoval revisits the spitting aggression of Southtown’s title track. It’s a hit but one with a sense of rhythm and urgency the band have rarely found in the last seven years. When a neo organ rips across the top it feels like the band are stretching and thankfully they are and even better is the realisation that it works.

But when they stretch for the next song, an urban r&b mistake called On The Grind, Testify falls apart. The Booyah Tribe come across as Cypress Hill but Cypress Hill never tried to impersonate Ashanti like the falsetto chorus ripped up and planted smack in the middle of On The Grind. And so it is with Testify – just when a good to middling song redeems the album a poorly executed idea supplants it. P.O.D need to freshen up, they’ve been mining the same lyrical and musical ground for too long and it’s becoming both boring and artistically corrupt.