Sixx AM – This Is Gonna Hurt

Sixx: A.M., the current project of Motley Crue guitarist Nikki Sixx, wouldn’t get a second look if it wasn’t for their spotlight pedigree.  Their sophomore album, This Is Gonna Hurt, feels like nothing more than a stab at immediate relevancy and sure-fire radio play.  Chalk full of tunes that sound as if Sixx could have written them in his sleep – the disc is a snooze for anyone that’s turned the dial over the past twenty years and tuned into Nickleback or anything produced under Butch Walker.  This Is Gonna Hurt feels most like a band repackaging a lifetime of clichés for an audience that knows nothing new.

To compound matters, Nikki doesn’t really seem to know what form he want the project to take, making for a jumbled mess or an identity crisis.  For instance, opener and title track “This Is Gonna Hurt” along with follow-up “Lies Of The Beautiful People” seem to want to be token balls-to-the-wall rock tracks circa Motley Crue, but then moments later “Mare You With Me Now” transforms into some sort of castrated soft-rock ballad with very little conviction.  The worst offender, “Sure Feels Right,” mimics the personalized nature of one of Walkers solo efforts, only the vague lyrical content fails to attract empathy, causing his reasonable emotive voice to fall flat.  Compounding maters, the predictable violin only serves to strengthen my belief that most of this album was born in the producer’s booth.  Then there are songs like “Live Forever” that takes a nod from newer acts like Modest Mouse, which would actually turns out pretty well for the band if it didn’t feel so out of place on the record.

The album ends with the incredibly clichéd piano ballad “Skin.”  “When they start to judge you, show them your true colours, and do unto others, as you’d have done to you, just rise above this, kill them with your kindness” croons a mellow Sixx.  It’s a line that’s tough to take seriously considering that Sixx: A.M. certainly doesn’t feel like a genuine expression itself.  I’ll concede that Nikki and his crew can play their instruments as well as their lineage implies, but each note just feels so calculated and commercial that they never reach the energy or attitude of Sixx’s past successes.