Taproot: Gift : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

Taproot's major-label debut is a short, sharp shock -- forty-three and a half minutes of pure heartland heavy-rock rage. These songs' choruses don't give relief from the cacophony so much as they throw the listener into even more jagged corners. Unfortunately, the Michigan quartet's pretty-hate-machine anti-authoritarian lyrics sound preprogrammed ("Life sucks sometimes," goes "Emotional Times"). The young band can't exactly shake its influences: Singer Stephen Richards evokes Trent Reznor's whispered menace one minute ("Now") and Jonathan Davis of Korn's paranoid-android whine the next ("Comeback"). In the end, TapRoot's youthful energy overpowers their limitations. Gift eventually becomes one monstrous, challenging opus of spiky sonics, with one song blending into the next -- but in a good way. As Richards' vocal figures zigzag around the rough-edged guitar-bass-drums and the band settles into a jackhammer groove, the album becomes a true gift. (RS 847)

MATT DIEHL