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NONPOINT
Development (MCA)
Reviewed by DJ Johnson
Miami's Nonpoint continue to evolve and grow in the world of alt metal, and their new CD, Development, is titled to declare it to the world. The instrumental power is smack on, with tight, crisp riffs to keep your mind ping-ponging around the better-heed-em messages of vocalist Elias Soriano. KB's bass tone is just a monster, anchoring everything and leaving all males within twenty yards of your speakers sterile. You SHOULD feel the bass in every part of your body, and with this guy's tone (and probably thanks in large part to Jason Bieler's production) you can. Listening to Development I get a similar vibe that I get from Darwin's Waiting Room, another favorite of mine and, perhaps not so coincidentally, another South Florida band. And they're not alone down there. It seems like more and more of the most interesting hard music is coming from that part of the country. Something in the water, I guess.
Nonpoint's development in songcraft is evident in "Circles," a clever song in which the basically circular riff followed by all three instrumentalists is matched thematically by the lyric. Unlike almost every band in the hard rock universe, Nonpoint aren't a one-trick pony. While many songs are controlled power (hard hard hard but the reverb space is wide open and clean), they're not shy about tossing a Molotov cocktail of chaos into the track list. "Excessive Reaction" is exactly that, each instrument crowding the other, overtones fighting for air, until one beautiful passage when everything clears away for a few moments of psychedelic bass and drums. The clouds return soon enough and the air crowded again. At 2:51 and at hyperspeed, it's a song that is their own but could have been a Dead Boys monster, had they thought to write it. No band in a box, this.
Only a few songs have the "filler" sound. Ironically, the most normal (read: like everybody else) song on the disc is track 4, "Normal Days." What are the odds? Most of this is grade A hard rock and roll with lyrics you should try to catch. You won't be able to read them in the liner notes. Either someone was being funny or someone is an idiot, because even a person with 20/20 vision and a microscope couldn't read most of what's in the liner notes. I had to mix guess-work with online research of people they've worked with in the past to figure out who produced this CD, and that font is twice the size of the lyric font. (Thanks, MCA!)
Longtime fans of the band should also be aware that Soriano's fondness for breaking into Spanish rap seems to be a thing of the past. Perhaps the label said "don't," perhaps the band decided they'd done it and they had to leave it behind in order to develop. So remove "rapcore" from the list of genres on their database entry and get over it. Nonpoint rock hard, have that Southern Florida mystique and cleverness, and stand head and shoulders above most of the pack in talent, if not in recognition... yet.
© 2002 - DJ Johnson