Limp Bizkit Results May Vary CD

Limp Bizkit: Fred Durst (vocals, guitar); Sam Rivers (guitar, bass); Mike Smith (guitar); Jon Otto (beats); DJ Lethal.
Producers: Fred Durst, Rick Rubin, Terry Date, DJ Lethal.
It took a long, long time for Limp Bizkit to get their follow-up to Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water into the stores. First, guitarist Wes Borland, generally regarded as the band's musical force, up and left the band, and it took a long, long time to find a replacement guitarist. After a national talent search performed at Guitar Center stores, where candidates had to sign contracts that gave up their rights to anything original they played at their audition, Limp Bizkit settled on former Snot guitarist Mike Smith and recorded an album. Then scrapped it. Then they recorded another album. Then scrapped it. They were going through album titles, too -- it was called Bipolar and then, charmingly, Panty Sniffer. Finally, all the sessions and the turmoil were whittled down into one very long album called Results May Vary. Without Borland on the album, Limp Bizkit turns to frontman Fred Durst, who already dominated the band's personality and now must provide direction in addition to bravado. Durst doesn't come up with any new musical ideas, apart from slight hints of Staind and emo on the ballads, and he generally runs amuck, spewing bile at targets including Britney Spears, ranting about how she broke his heart. He complains about being picked on in high school and about radio and MTV playing the same old bands, and invokes icons like Kurt Cobain. Results May Vary would have been improved if the music had a fraction of Durst's anger (no matter how misguided it is) or had energy to match the clown jumping up and down and screaming in front. ~ Stephen Thomas Erlewine
It took a long, long time for Limp Bizkit to get their follow-up to Chocolate Starfish and the Hotdog Flavored Water into the stores. First, guitarist Wes Borland, generally regarded as the band's musical force, up and left the band, and it took a long, long time to find a replacement guitarist. After a national talent search performed at Guitar Center stores, where candidates had to sign contracts that gave up their rights to anything original they played at their audition, Limp Bizkit settled on former Snot guitarist Mike Smith and recorded an album. Then scrapped it. Then they recorded another album. Then scrapped it. They were going through album titles, too -- it was called Bipolar then, charmingly, Panty Sniffer. Finally, all the sessions and the turmoil was whittled down into one very long, very bad album called Results May Vary. Part of its weakness stems from two perennial Limp Bizkit problems: for a metal band they sound, well, limp, and in Fred Durst they have the worst frontman in the history of rock. These two things plagued even their hits, but Borland at least gave the band some ideas. Without him, the band is left to flounder, and Durst, who already dominated the band's personality, not only has to provide the bravado, but he has to give it direction -- which is likely why it took so long for this mess to get released. Durst doesn't come up with any new musical ideas, apart from slight hints of Staind and emo on the ballads, but the album doesn't suffer from recycled musical ideas, since they were already doing that on Chocolate Starfish. No, it suffers from an utter lack of form and direction, from the riffs to the rhythms, and a surplus of stolen ideas. "The Only One" cops the opening of Steve Miller's "Take the Money and Run," "Gimme the Mic" plagiarizes the Beastie Boys' "Pass the Mic" down to rhyming "y'all" with "y'all" (but Durst adds a whole lotta "motherf*ckers"), while "Phenomenon" borrows from several rap songs, highlighted by Durst getting lyrics wrong. And this points out the biggest problem of Results May Vary -- Durst is running amuck, flattening down the production into a grey sludge, then writing inane lyrics that are shocking in their banalQ (12/03, p.132) - 4 stars out of 5 - "...'Gimme The Mic' and 'Head For The Barricade' are the most thrilling rap/metal car crashes in recent memory..."