Graveyard Classics

by

Six Feet Under

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If there's any concept that has been laboriously tested and found wanting in inspiration -- aside from the unanimously reviled tribute album -- it's the covers LP. Basically, here's where the boys you know and love take a break from producing real music and pretend they're a bar band again, working for a beer tab and whatever their girlfriends can shake out of the semi-conscious pub patrons that have collected (intentionally or not) in their presence. And they've got the anything-to-please-the-crowd set list to prove it.

What's disturbing about Six Feet Under is not their dismal lyrics or haunted house artwork but their seeming willingness to coast on their success as one of the top death metal draws around the world. First, they follow up their endearing debut with a valueless EP and sub par sophomore effort, and then they re-release last year's return to form ("Maximum Violence") six months later with a few cover songs thrown on as bonus tracks. Now to start off the millennium we get a whole album of blindingly obvious "graveyard classics." The fact that, for most budding metal guitarists, "Smoke on the Water" is the first song learned should be clue enough that no professional band need bother covering it, but SFU trudge through not only that tired war horse but "Purple Haze" and "Sweet Leaf" as well. What we have here is the "Wayne's World" soundtrack re-imagined as an album full of stoner death metal anthems. First time listeners may get a chuckle out of hearing Chris Barnes' glass gargling renditions of some old favorites, but most death metal fans will have experienced this all-too-brief amusement many times before.