(Wind Up/EMI)

If absence makes the heart grow founder, Creed’s five-year hiatus has clearly not been long enough. A mere mention of their name brings back shivers of disgust and memories of choker necklaces, peroxide and gel hairdos, puffy skate shoes and every other vile trend that afflicted high school kids in the early ‘00s. If an isolated mention of the band name invokes this, imagine the widespread devastation an entire new album could wreak? Sounding like they spent their five years apart collecting Nickleback tour t-shirts, hitting on their first cousins and thinking of new and unexciting ways to gentrify Alice In Chains riffs, Full Circle is a collection of stale, unimaginative made-for-Triple-M ballads that will leave listeners dry-reaching through tracks like On My Sleeve and Time. The most frustrating aspect of Full Circle is that it sees Creed return to the mediocrity that catapulted them into super-stardom. The riffs are ‘quasi’ grunge (Bread Of Shame), the rhythms are ‘pseudo’ nu metal (Overcome), the lyrics ‘vaguely’ up-lifting and ‘loosely’ religious (Rain, Away In Silence). Full Circle is Creed once again dabbling in credible genres, and combining them into a vomitus pastiche of mainstream, radio-friendly douche-rock. Starved of any aural nourishment when listening to the new Creed album, the mind wanders to other things that have gone ‘full circle’; the presidential legacy of the Bush family, episodes I to III of the Star Wars saga, the human butthole. Creed’s Full Circle earns its inclusion on this list with alarming immediacy.

½

TOM HERSEY

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