Gazzoleen
Tinybears

This writing of mine aims to earn the title of most useless review on Debaser. I know I have fierce competitors - I mean, there are thirteen reviews of the ultimate masterpiece A Matter Of Life And Death - but I’m offering the only album by an eighth-tier Belgian nu metal band that disbanded twenty years ago in the utmost indifference, never reuniting even when a reunion was not denied even to the AC/DC cover band of the butcher's son, and totally and rightly forgotten even by the members' mothers.

Today, therefore, we are talking about the indispensable Gazzoleen and their fundamental Tinybears, a 2001 album later reissued (for obscure reasons I struggle to comprehend) in a Night Edition two years later. Another two years and they dissolved in 2005, when the corpse of nu metal was already smelly and decomposed. So, how is this Tinybears? You’re probably already shouting out loud It sucks!, and you are obviously right, but the bad thing is that it’s not even one of those albums so hideously bad that it’s fun to mock by pointing at it like it's Quasimodo, like the Korn album with Skrillex, for example. No, Tinybears is such a useless work that it’s not even worth criticizing.

It’s a well-produced album, well-packaged, with its nice 3D graphic cover in perfect Y2K style: in short, it all seems tailor-made to please a nu metal fan. And therein lies the rub: there’s not an atom of personality, an infinitesimal shred of imagination. Everything is copied here and there from the favorite bands of teenagers from 2001 and assembled into a patchwork stew without rhyme or reason. There’s a lot of Korn, there are the pop choruses of Papa Roach, there’s the downtuned guitars of Coal Chamber, there’s the sentimental song in the style of Creed, there’s the piece inspired by Limp Bizkit and the atmospheric one like Deftones. It’s all so imitative that it’s unclear whether it intends to be a pathetic – albeit rightful – attempt to jump on the nu metal bandwagon (at the time of its peak media exposure), a simple and innocent Hey what a cool thing these Americans are, let’s copy them exactly the same or a calligraphic homage to the entire genre. In the latter case, the nearest comparison that comes to mind is that rascal Nargaroth and his silly tribute Black Metal Ist Krieg, but here both an adequate historicization of nu metal and a sufficient ability to understand the text are missing to grasp the mechanisms and secrets of the success of the mentioned bands. They limit themselves to the most superficial and immediately recognizable aspects: we put the growled scat of Jonathan Davis here, we put two random scratches there, etc. There’s no precise direction, unlike the typical Z-series derivative band that decides to slavishly copy one, maximum two specific bands: Gazzoleen just gorge on any heavy guitar riff that passed on MTV during that period. The boy applies himself a lot, but he’s stupid. Even the band’s name is awful, and in Italian, it inadvertently takes on a vulgar and rustic sound.

If one wants, one can even add a vague sense of waste: the band doesn’t lack a certain melodic taste, some parts – take this with a grain of salt – are catchy, and a couple of songs, if you like the genre and have low standards, might even end up being pleasant. The opening “Filter”, released as a single, had radio potential, and the silly “Jelle-Fish” entertains with its catchy and insistent FAT FUCK FAT FUCK.

Of course, this mediocrity does not save Tinybears, but it would also be pointless to completely bash an entirely harmless album, which might even be appreciable by hardcore nu metal completists; they still exist, indeed, especially in recent times where a certain kind of grotesque aesthetic derived from nu metal and mall-goth is coming back into fashion on the internet. Gazzoleen, on the other hand, have condemned themselves to the most absolute oblivion.

The rating is based on sympathy.