Papa Roach at The Academy, Dublin 6th of December 2013

Nu-metal had its day towards the turn of the century – well maybe about 730 of them – but those days have long gone and their proponents fled to pastures new. Pioneers of the genre Korn have found Skrillex and his wub wub wub friends down a dubstep rabbit hole, Linkin Park went all bland stadium rock while soundtracking Transformers films, and Limp Bizkit, Staind and P.O.D. had the good grace to fade into obscurity, hopefully spending some time to work on their respective spelling.

Papa Roach meanwhile, have genre hopped from nu-metal, to emo, to a sort of electronic rock; to varying degrees of success. Nevertheless, they have filled the Academy and, from the moment Jacoby Shaddix – we last saw him as Coby Dick showing us around his (*flicks through Auctioneers Thesaurus*) cosy three bed semi in MTV Cribs – steps onto his wooden plinth at the front of the stage to kick off with Burn, there is energy in the room.

Shaddix plays the perfect front man. If he’s not rocking out himself or instructing the crowd what to do – bounce, mosh, sing, wall of death, etc. – he’s patting the heads of those carried over the security barriers for crowd surfing or getting down from the stage to penetrate deep into the audience, as he does singing Born With Nothing, Die With Everything. It’s hard to know sometimes if he’s more than just a cheerleader. He’s even a confident storyteller, though the one he tells after an audience member throws a tampon on stage is not repeatable in polite company.

It all works though and even the staunchest of naysayers would struggle to resist a smile or some toe-tapping at the very least. The energy is just infectious. From Silence is the Enemy to Between Angels and Insects – the other song you may have heard – you can see why this band remain on the scene so long after the heyday of the genre they claimed as their own.

It doesn’t all work out though. Scars and Leader of the Broken Hearts are as emo as they sound and, if taken in isolation, cheesier than a cartoon mouse could handle; Shaddix’s proclamation of “It’s been too long since we’ve been here” is entirely clichéd; and his insistence the at the crowd chant “Papa Roach” towards the end of the set is cringeworthy.

There is a base sensibility that the show continuously appeals to. The primal desire for an adrenalin boost is what 80 minutes of a Papa Roach show feeds. It says it all that show closer Last Resort (oh yeah, that’s the song I know) does not represent a high point of the evening. The crowd jump and sing along to that 2000 smash – it got to number 13 in the Irish charts – but they’ve been doing that all night anyway.

Musical tastes may have left Papa Roach behind, but there will always be a place for them if they continue to put on live shows as energetic and enthusiastic as this.