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Reviews

Limp Bizkit, ‘Gold Cobra’

4
SPIN Rating: 4 of 10
Release Date: June 28, 2011
Label: Interscope

Oh my god, they’re back again. Rap-rock’s original boy band haven’t made an album together since Chocolate Starfish and the Hot Dog Flavored Water in 2000, after which guitarist Wes Borland split (for the first time) and frontman Fred Durst began his unlikely transformation into a mid-level Hollywood film director. So what do a fully reunited Limp Bizkit sound like a decade after the death of their cultural moment? Not much like they’ve grown up, for starters: “We got this party going harder than a motherfucker,” Durst raps in “90.2.10,” “All these naked ladies making out with one another.”

Gold Cobra teems with frat-bro inanity; “Douche Bag,” in particular, seems lifted verbatim from the Lonely Island’s latest. But as anyone who’s suffered through 2003’s Borland-free Results May Vary can tell you, there’s a weird power to the guitarist’s antics that somehow mitigates Durst’s wack-ass flow.

Here, it often feels like they’re playing in two different bands — see “Bring It Back,” where Durst gleefully relives the good times while Borland worries over a claustrophobic goth-funk groove that nine out of ten hipsters might mistake for Massive Attack. Occasionally, though, they cohere with surprising force. “Another one of those days,” Durst growls in “Shark Attack,” quoting himself from “Break Stuff,” “feeling like a shovel with a lot of shit in the way.” And you think you’ve got baggage.