#Rollins Band #Henry Rollins #alternative metal #hard rock #post-hardcore #funk metal #1990s #ex-Black Flag #music video
In honor of the recently reunited Weight-era Rollins Band, I thought I would review the album itself, as no one else has yet. Weight was without any doubt the high point, commercially, for the Rollins Band, in no small way thanks to the heavily rotated "Liar" video on MTV. But what many people fail to remember is just how much this album really rocks as a whole, and that "Liar," as great of a song as it is, is not the best track on the album. This album sees former bass player Andrew Weiss leaving the band and allowing new, more jazz-oriented bassist Melvin Gibbs to step up and get some. Musically speaking, this album was a bit of a departure from their previous album, The End of Silence. Where that album featured very long, intense and beautifully structured punk/blues jams, this album tightens up the song length and delivers a more hard rock/punk metal type of crushing tunes. Both albums are fantastic and both enjoyed a marginal amount of mainstream success, a first for Rollins. This album is full of gems - the brutal "Volume 4" and "Step Back," or the surprisingly funky "Wrong Man" and "Fool." My personal favorite is the very positive and extremely inspiring "Shine," a song which seems to be Henry's own personal motto with lines like "I ain't got no time for drug addiction, no time for smoke and booze, too strong for a shortened lifespan, I've got no time to lose, It's time to shine..." Well, you get the point. And then, of course, we have "Liar," an often misunderstood song with Rollins singing from the perspective of, well, a liar. He has mentioned in interviews that he simply wanted to "write the meanest love song ever" and the song is about someone else lying to him, not vice versa. The only other real difference between this album and his previous ones is that Henry doesn't "scream" at all, which isn't a bad thing since he makes up for it with plenty of angry yelling, but some people may have missed that. Anyway, this is a classic album and one of the greatest albums of the 1990s by far. From: https://www.punknews.org/review/5250/rollins-band-weight
Rollins Band was an American rock band formed in Van Nuys, California. The band was active from 1987 to 2006 and was led by former Black Flag vocalist Henry Rollins. They are best known for the songs "Low Self Opinion" and "Liar", which both earned heavy airplay on MTV in the early to mid 1990s. Critic Steve Huey describes their music as "uncompromising, intense, cathartic fusions of funk, post-punk, noise, and jazz experimentalism, with Rollins shouting angry, biting self-examinations and accusations over the grind." From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rollins_Band
