That Hinder’s second album, Take It To the Limit, doesn’t have a half-naked girl on the cover is an outrage. Instead, it is of the band standing in front of expensive cars, a mansion and girls wearing actual clothes — that’s probably a step up for them. Probably.
Despite Hinder only being one album deep, there is an expectation for them to be trashy and damn proud of it. Hell, they named their debut album Extreme Behavior and its accompanying first single “Get Stoned.”
Thus, everything on Limit is bigger, dumber and louder than its predecessor. Think M?tley Cr?e without the artistic vision. Hinder clearly sees this record as progression, which it is if progression means going from wet to really wet.
Yet, to fault Limit for being unoriginal is to miss the point of Hinder. This is a band that will never be revolutionary or influential in any way. Instead, Hinder must be approached with a grain of salt whose size is comparable to Jupiter’s circumference.
With that, the main issue with this album, as with the band itself, is singer Austin Winkler. He can’t sing. At all. His futile attempts at aiming for notes are on par with our vice president’s ability to shoot quail. When Winkler tries to match the soaring music, it forces the listener to wonder why he doesn’t finish his battle with constipation before recording and not during.
His voice isn’t so bad during the ballads, and that’s only because he doesn’t have to sing above the arrangements. “Without You” — or “Lips of an Angel 2” — is bearable during the verses when he can just coast within the music, trying his best to croon. The chorus, however, showcases why Winkler’s voice is buried under the guitars throughout the album: His voice is the coarsest thing in music today. He makes Stevie Nicks sound like Whitney Houston.
Without Winkler’s voice, Limit would be decent. The music is mixed for maximum, arena-sized impact. But all this corporate schlock doesn’t amount to much beyond stupid entertainment.
Thus, the actual rock songs here — “Use Me,” “Up All Night” and the title track — are so overproduced, they completely overpower Winkler’s man-squeak. And that’s a good thing because they don’t have much else going for them. Much like every song here, the rockers are as generic as can be, including the laughable at best six-second finger-spasms that pass for solos.
Speaking of laughable, Hinder seems to have ripped themselves off lyrically. “Loaded and Alone” contains the lyric, “He wanted fame, fame, fame/ Even just a little bit of shame, shame, shame/ He would sell his soul for it.” If part of the chorus sounds familiar to Hinder fans, that’s because it is. Well, “familiar” isn’t the right word. It’s more like “duplicate.” You may recall that there is a line in a Behavior single called “Homecoming Queen” that goes, “It’s such a shame, shame, shame/ That our homecoming queen/ Was a lot like you and a lot like me.” Yes, Hinder copied themselves with a lyric about shame.
If room-temperature-IQ-level rock is your thing, then you will love Limit. For the rest of us, let’s just ignore Hinder and hope they go away.
1 1/2 stars out of 5
