(hed) p.e. - "Renegade"

[jvandyck87]

Somehow we don't have a thread for this single. At least I couldn't find one. This has been bouncing around the top 40 of active rock for over three months now. That's pretty impressive considering that they have never had a very successful single, and haven't charted at all since 2003. I didn't like "Blackout" but I like this, and I liked "Bartender."

[pen]

At first I was skeptical. I said to myself, I make all the Hed (P.E.) threads around here, there's no way I didn't make one for this song. And then I did a search and found out you were right. I didn't make one for this single. I am ashamed of myself.

This song comes from their latest album New World Orphans which came out at the start of this year, and really, it's not a terrible album. The regular album is 20 tracks long, 16 minus four "intro" tracks, and there are also two bonus tracks and the album comes in three color versions with each version having two more bonus tracks of their own, so all together the band released 26 songs for this album. Extremely impressive.

It's less impressive after listening to it all and finding that for one, the bonus tracks suck. They are mostly straight up hip-hop tracks and bad ones at that. The meat of the album is better though, with the top half of the album being almost straight heavy metal-punk-rap hybrid tracks and then the back half consisting of some more experimental tracks, and some of them work well, like the pop-punk anthem "Tow The Line", the dark and somber "Self Aware", and the hip-hop singalong "This Love". Hed (P.E.) of late has always been good for variety, at least.

The major issue I always have with Hed is in the lyrics, especially on their last few albums. When Jahred isn't beating people over the head with raps about government conspiracy and throwing out buzzwords like Templar Knights and Illuminati and etc., he's being incredibly disrespectful to women, especially on the horrifying "Everything All The Time" and the track "Stepping Stone", a b-side from Only In Amerika now here in a complete version, although the demo was more promising than the result. Jahred is my opinion a vocalist with a great amount of style and talent, and absolutely nothing worthwhile to do with it.

Still, for me at least, as long as I more or less ignore the lyrics, it's a pretty solid album. I'd venture to say it's definitely far from the best, but it's a little bit better than some of the other active rock dreck that's come out this year. I certainly like this more than Papa Roach's Metamorphosis or Static-X's Cult Of Static.

[Nicholas2.0]

This song isn't terrible, but it's not any good. The "teaser single," I guess it would've been, "Ordo Ab Chao," was actually decent. I couldn't believe it.

However, I saw a t-shirt of theirs the other day with a skeleton guy wearing a ballcap with the brim flipped up (reading "hed") and a plaid shirt buttoned only at the very top and I found it to be an extremely unfortunate homage to Suicidal Tendencies. :(