Band:	Fozzy
Album:	Do You Wanna Start A War
Style:	Heavy metal
Release date:	July 22, 2014
A review by:	Doc G.

01. Do You Wanna Start A War
02. Bad Tattoo
03. Lights Go Out
04. Died With You
05. Tonight [feat. Ralph "Michael Starr" Saenz]
06. Brides Of Fire
07. One Crazed Anarchist
08. Unstoppable [feat. Christie Cook]
09. Scarecrow
10. No Good Way
11. SOS
12. Witchery

It seems a little too easy picking on a band like Fozzy. The soapbox-contrarian part of me wants to love this album out of spite...But I just can't do it. Do You Wanna Start A War? is about as bland as it gets.

Fozzy is just flat-out boring. A Fozzy album is what an overprotective parent buys their pre-teen kid after giving up on trying to get them to give up metal. People quitting smoking switch to e-cigarettes, recovering alcoholics switch to alcohol-free beer, heroin addicts get methadone. If an addiction to metal was a real thing, Fozzy would seem like the logical anti-addictive. It's metal-lite. Not light-metal as in "a hard rock band with a metal edge" but closer to that feeling you get when someone tries to convince you skim milk is still milk. Bullshit. That analogy might strike you as a bit irrelevant, but once you hear Do You Wanna Start A War?, you'll see how drawing a comparison between this album and a flat, colorless mundane food item is actually quite appropriate.

So Fozzy are boring. Who gives a shit? If you want to be realistic, 99.9% of music that comes out is horrendously boring. What makes Fozzy remarkable in this aspect is that the memorable parts of this album are an amalgam of other people's music. Take for example "Lights Go Out" - it sounds like they were attempting some Nine Inch Nails meets Ozzy Osbourne approach, but instead it sounds like a mix between Sepultura's "Roots, Bloody Roots" and Robin Thicke's "Give It 2 U". Robin Thicke influence aside, this is pretty much a cover album of a collection of various radio-rock and classic heavy metal riffs. Between the misguided plagiarism and the slick, squeeky-clean over-production, it's hard to think of Fozzy as anything but a scaled-back Avenged Sevenfold.

Do You Wanna Start A War? No, Fozzy, I want you to start writing better music. Coming to a discount bin near you!