Well, you’ve got to give Moody and company one thing: in a sea of terrible stage names, Five Finger Death Punch managed to find a collection of words just edgy and insecure enough to fit their style of music to a tee. The band have long lived in infamy, becoming the butt of every joke imaginable in the hard rock and metal scenes, but they do have their fans, and new record ‘Legacy’ aims to showcase everything that put them on the map. It’s not so much a celebration as it is a regurgitation.

Lead single ‘Eye Of The Storm’ is pretty neat, in that it acts as a handy little Rorschach test. If you feel drawn in by the song’s big, big chorus and its larger-than-life aggression, you’ll find no shortage of either ingredient across the wider album— should, conversely, you find the track’s barebones riffs, obvious melodies and utterly ridiculous production to be headache-inducing, you’d be better off giving this one a miss. In truth, most of the songs that make up ‘Legacy’ aren’t out-and-out insufferable (on a purely musical front, that is), but neither are they making much of an argument to actually be paid attention to, regardless of how obnoxiously loud they can be. It’s safe to say that Five Finger Death Punch weren’t exactly pushing themselves with this one.

You can certainly find positive aspects in the semi-anthemic hooks on ‘De Oppresso Liber’ and ‘Scapegoat,’ or in the genuinely solid lead guitar work that the band’s newest member Andy James brings to the table— ‘find’ really is the key word though, as Moody and company seem routinely determined to bury any and all goodwill they’ve somehow accrued. In someone else’s hands, perhaps the relatively technical playing of the title track or the bruising menace that runs through ‘Shelter’ would carry some weight… but this is Five Finger Death Punch we’re talking about, so of course every instrumental performance has been wrung dry of all nuance, heart or soul. Charlie Engen throws in some double-kick to round out ‘Unscathed,’ but it, like every other drum part on the entire project, is lost in a mix that, quite frankly, just doesn’t give a sh*t.

In some ways, ‘Legacy’ really is the perfect summation of the group’s entire catalogue, because it’s falling into the same pitfalls as ‘Afterlife,’ ‘Got Your Six’ and every other record of theirs: Five Finger Death Punch don’t want to be the greatest band to ever grace a stage so long as you know just how badass and masculine they are, and this philosophy feeds directly into their music. The strings on ‘Nails In The Coffin’ have to be that cliché and dramatic, because how else would you know how epic and bombastic the song is: likewise, how could the fans possibly figure out how macho Ivan Moody is if he didn’t routinely dip into vocal tones that lie somewhere between Hulk Hogan and Cookie Monster? And y’know, if he weren’t telling you how cool he is, over and over and over again.

Yes, the music ‘Legacy’ will subject you to may be annoying, but its lyrics are downright unbearable— there truly, truly is no excusing them. Even if you could somehow buy that every member of Five Finger Death Punch is some beer-chugging, sex-having alpha male, the verses Ivan Moody chews his way through would still be outright unlistenable because they’re so very childish. You’ve got the nursery rhyme-esque counting on ‘Unscathed’ to contend with, and that’s not even mentioning the god awful bark of “if crazy knows crazy then I’m insane, ‘cus I keep coming back just for the pain.” You could easily fill a scrapbook with terrible one-liners from these ten tracks, whether it be “am I suicidal or homicidal, I just can’t tell” from ‘Shelter’ or “the biggest difference between you and I: you just can’t live and I just won’t die” off of ’Scapegoat’— truly, no lyric is off limits.

What the band’s tenth album amounts to, then, is a whole lot of testosterone and a shockingly shallow pool of actual ideas: mixed in amongst the angst and the attitude, there just isn’t much room for these songs to breathe or develop. ‘In Time’ isn’t a horrible song in concept, but this introspective ballad is just getting crushed under Zoltan Bathory’s boot as the band fill it with some of the blandest guitar work on the record— ‘Everybody Lies’ meets a similar (albeit far more egregious) end, with its sappy acoustic guitars and repeated “la la la” refrains coming as a stark reminder of why Nickelback were bullied so mercilessly two decades ago. Even Five Finger Death Punch themselves seem eager to get ‘Shelter’ and ‘Joke’s On Me’ over and done with, and we’re with them on that one.

If you need an even smaller snapshot of ‘Legacy’ than the aforementioned ‘Eye Of The Storm,’ just listen to Ivan Moody’s sneer of “f*ck you” that closes out the record— you’ll get pretty much the same experience from that as you will from the entire ten track album. Five Finger Death Punch aren’t reinventing the wheel, and we wouldn’t expect them to on this celebratory release: what they are doing, though, is continuing to appeal solely to the edgy teenagers and the divorced dads of the world. For those groups in particular, maybe ‘Legacy’ knocks it out of the park, but not so for us.