Kopek- White Collar Lies

Sometime in the late eighties to early nineties, I thought everyone got together and decided arena rock and hair metal had run its unbearable course. Grunge helped put a stop to that, which would itself get laughable as the alt-grunge bands flooded the scene. Music like Kopek is why the underground exists. When a style takes over the radio, especially when it’s hair metal, there’s always going to be people interested in something else, and there will always be people making that something else. 2010 is different than 1982, where you hear a lot of electro-pop/hip-hop, like Lady Gaga or Katy Perry, but the rock scene has splintered into too many parts to be a part of one machine. Possibly in a revival or in homage to nostalgia, Kopek goes heavy on the arena rock sound, and it serves my memory well why they killed this genre over twenty years ago.

Everything about Kopek is big and flashy, from the massive riffs to the throaty, anthemic singing. The lyrics are broad, fuck-off/kill the establishment, which also went out some time ago. The sound is just one big cheeseball, full of cheap rock bravado. These guys may really look in the mirror and tell themselves they’re what true rock n’ roll is all about, with their guitars and fuck you and fuck this, but the songs just aren’t good and it sounds so dated and image conscious. “Cocaine Chest Pains” lays on the cheesy arena theme, and lead single “Love is Dead” is an unlistenable recount of pretty much ‘everything is dead’ (which it isn’t). Being a cocksure band, firing people up, and berating them with huge distorted electric guitars doesn’t work anymore. You need real songs, that have real texture, and real lyrics – at least ones that weren’t taken from a creed that has long been buried.