(Note: I debuted in the Georgia Straight with this review, which reads better now than I would have expected. It’s also written by a different person. References to Rolling Stone magazine and “moral majority Republicans” seem so distant and naive in 2023. One has become a cartoonish vector for establishment consensus-making, same with Vice, while the other has been supplanted by lib-left “progressives”—Democrats, if we’re using American slang—as the brattiest and most dangerous religious group in our midst. Things have flipped so dramatically.)

It's been five years since Limp Bizkit's "Nookie" was the heavy-rotation headache that defined rap-flavoured nu-metal as the sound of the suburbs. Since then fortunes have been lost, and the Bizkit has been shuffled right off the map. Their disciples, like the California quartet Papa Roach, have struggled to keep the buzz alive. Saturday's packed Commodore would indicate the quartet has had some success. Even more surprising, Papa Roach has experienced some musical growth over the years. Not much, but enough to make its set breathless and fun.

After a shaky start, the Roach was walking upright by the time it powered into the title track of its latest album, Getting Away with Murder—a name that hints at a certain amount of self-awareness. The music, frankly, is repetitive, graceless, noisy, inert, and tends to deaden the soul, but still, this is a band that has truly mastered its two moods: Extreme and To-The-Max. The group also knows how to work an audience; when the Roach plays "Everybody Jump", everybody jumps.

Lead singer Jacoby Shaddix walked out and planted himself on the monitor front and centre, where he remained for most of the night with one fist raised while the other rested on his modest package. "This is a song about fuckin' pain. This is a song about scars," Shaddix said, introducing the band's latest single with the kind of hammy, theatrical intensity that recalled William Shatner doing "My Heart Will Go On". There was no encore, perhaps because the relationship between product and consumer had been satisfied. These men are naturals at signifying nothing, and anybody who says they're not for real should have seen their in-ear monitors falling out all over the place.

The big surprise of the night was the second opener, Skindred. Its bass player was attending a funeral in the U.K., but the remaining band members still whammied the audience. Frontman Benji "Dred" Webb was an antic fun-machine who looked like Jacob "The Killer" Miller and sounded like Horace Andy. Skindred cross-pollinated its hardcore with dancehall riddim, making Webb an appropriately fractured personality to lead the band. He had the crowd eating from his hand once he'd finished scolding it in the persona of a bouncer from London's East End. The band, meanwhile, was more convincing in its abandon than the headliners.

At the end of the show, the venue emptied quickly, with one barely legal kid brazening his way across the floor in a Germs T-shirt. He seemed downright dangerous compared to the Mark's Work Warehouse/Rock Shop vibe of the rest of the crowd. (Most baseball caps, surprisingly, were pointed forward. This is always better for the bands, who otherwise might think that some of the audience is looking the other way.) In the end, I was surprised that Papa Roach is the kind of Main Street U.S.A. outfit that is approved of not only by Rolling Stone, but also by moral- majority Republicans, because its music actually seems to reverse the sex urge. Nonetheless, as we filed out, a small group of girls was pooling near the green room. They were presumably looking to become Mama Roaches, each capable of producing millions of eggs.

Georgia Straight, February 2005