Rollins Finds a New Voice in ‘Weight’

ROLLINS BAND

“Weight”

Imago

* * *

Dazed by incessant violence, fried from information overload, worn down by the task of living, the characters stumbling through Henry Rollins’ songs are easy marks for slick messiahs, false-front entertainers and poets peddling gangster fantasies to fools who end up paying the heavy price.

Rollins’ compelling need to assert his individuality amid these forces is the defining dynamic of his art, and it’s made him a hero to an audience that draws energy from his resolve. He’s like a martial-arts hero of the psychic terrain, and his war with hypocrisy and repression is played out on a scale that’s both intimate and larger than life--his feelings are too intense and colossal to be conveyed in conventional terms, so his bellow is super human, and his band plays its deliberate sludge-metal riffs with crushing power.

Rollins, also a writer and reader of prose and poetry, tries this time to vary his voice a bit, assuming character identities that require him to speak and rap in an actorish way that dilutes his power. And the album’s production (by Theo Van Rock) separates his singing from the instruments, so his voice seems superimposed on the music.

On his last album, “The End of Silence,” he was down there in the crucible and he came off as a relentless, primordial force of nature. The slightly synthetic feel here makes Rollins a little easier to identify, file and forget.

New albums are rated on a scale of one star (poor), two stars (fair), three stars (good) and four stars (excellent).