ALBUM REVIEW: Full Metal Jacket – Shok Paris

SHOK PARIS are returning from the annals of 80s hair metal history to bring us their first studio album in 31 years. However, the unimaginative album cover is, unfortunately, a sign of what is to come in this 12-track tired rehashing of their glory days. Boobs. On the cover of a heavy metal album. Groundbreaking. Whilst it’s what’s on the inside that counts when it comes to music, books, etc – this album cover is sadly a reflection of the tired and unimaginative hair metal inside SHOK PARIS’s Full Metal Jacket. This band is a collection of 50+ year old white dudes rehashing the glory days (when their songs were in the soundtracks to films such as 1987’s The Hidden) and it shows.

Album opener and title track Full Metal Jacket weirdly enough begins in exactly the same way that the Buffy the Vampire theme song does, and otherwise is the epitome of fine. Hats off to Donovan Kenaga who injects some much-needed life into the drumming grooves, but the vocal performance by Vic Hix is unforgivably weak and the guitar solos are just boring. The vocals continue to be very underwhelming throughout the album. Nature of the Beast fares well with a better guitar solo but this is the second verse-chorus-verse-solo-chorus structure in a row. Aside from the vocals, nothing is exactly wrong with Full Metal Jacket so far, but it’s just nothing special. The songs blend into each other.

Brothers in Arms begins promisingly enough, but it’s strength is also its weakness. It takes IRON MAIDEN-esque levels of epic 80s metal – but you are left with the feeling that you could have just put on any one of the great IRON MAIDEN albums and gotten far more out of the hour you spent listening to this one. The lyrics on this album are consistently not great – something that can be overlooked since lyrics were never the point of heavy metal – but on this song they are especially bad. The fifth time they sang “Til the end, brothers in arms we defend” it’s becoming boring, so by the thirtieth time it just really gets old. Lead single Hell Day is one of the stronger songs on the album, but even then the generic nature of the song and the repetition of the few lyrics that it contains stops anyone from actually enjoying it properly.

Full Metal Jacket album is fine. It’s okay. It’s fun, but there is no need for it to exist. There’s nothing which sets it apart from the pack. Not for anyone other than the most devoted fans of 80s dad-metal, SHOK PARIS probably should have stayed in the 80s. 

Rating: 3/10

Full Metal Jacket is out now via No Remorse Records. 

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