Otep – House of Secrets (Capitol)
Metal. A mix of nu, faux-death, and some basic hardcore and aggro. Not a bad listen at all, with some UNBELIEVABLE vocals. This girl puts men twice her size to shame, it’s crazy. The guitar playing is fairly basic, but they got Joey Jordison (of Slipknot) to play drums for them on a few songs. Say what you will about his band, the man can play the drums like none other. So that’s a bonus. A lot of the songs never go anywhere, though, and mostly are just her venting and being cryptic and introspective. Otherwise, pretty cool stuff, I gotta admit.

Tracks:
1) Eerie, creepy, scary, quiet, whispered intro.
2) The vocals on this are spine-tingling good. The whole song rocks and it’s so uber-political.
3) Ugh, who let the teen-angst crowd in? “I hate my life,” repeated about 20 times, makes me wanna hurl.
4) Better, with some pretty solid bass and drums. Lyrically, seems like she’s been drinking from the Trey Azagthoth “Fountain of Knowledge”. FCC (“shit”) at –1:08.
5) Another eerie-as-hell intro, and the rest of the song is all single acoustic guitar, subtle drums, music box, and quiet, introspective vocals... until it explodes! For about one minute it’s all histrionics and mayhem! Cool!
6) Nu-metal! Avoid at all costs. Play this and risk the scorn of all metal-heads everywhere. Also, FCCs.
7) One minute of spoken word, short poem.
8) Another eerie song, subdued vocals, sounding very hushed, light bass and guitar picking, and it builds up very slowly, until she lets out this primal scream, and her processed vocals take over at that point. Actually, come to think of it, a bit much like Fragile-era NIN.
9) Just like the last song, slowly, very slowly builds up with her hushed vocals and weird sound effects, and only the last 45 seconds or so are even remotely “heavy”. Definitely another Fragile-inspired song.
10) FCC (“fuck her”) at –2:17 and –0:54, but otherwise an awesome, almost-inspirational song that also builds up from a slow beginning, but is just far more vicious.
11) Nu-metal! Avoid, and again, FCCs.
12) Slow, piano start, builds up (noticing a pattern here?) and a single, whispered, barely-audible FCC (“fucked”) at –3:08. Never goes anywhere, though.