This came out in 2000 — or at least that’s when I got it. Here’s what I said about it back then (with some minor editing):
You expect bands to keep getting mellower and more commercial as they age. Trust the miserable metalheads in Ireland’s Therapy? to buck that trend.
After flirting with a melodic, poppier sound in the mid-’90s, this foursome have fully reawakened their savage, twisted inner demons on this seventh album. Lurching along on weird time signatures, propelled by thunderous drums and prodded by buzzsaw guitars that sound like Billy Gibbons and Bob Mould sharing a Marshall stack, these 11 eclectic and electrifying tracks indulge all of singer Andy Cairns’ many vocal personalities — his Beefhearty Tom Waits rumble, his John Lydon-meets-Mark E. Smith yelp, and even his Michael Stipe croon (especially on Six Mile Water, which shares DNA with R.E.M.’s So. Central Rain). Suicide Pact may not be Therapy?’s finest hour — that would be ’94’s Trouble Gum — but it undeniably breathes new life into the old coots.
