"Hey Man, Nice Shot" may have been a fluke hit, but Filter's Richard Patrick has spent four years working on the follow-up album, mastering enough sonic variety to ensure that Filter stick around the moshpit. Programmer Brian Liesegang is gone, but Patrick continues on, picking up the slack and yielding nothing. Crowd reaction is impossible to anticipate, but at 70 minutes, Title of Record is an exhaustive collection of hyperkinetic guitars, subliminal melodies and thunderous dynamics--which is to say, it sports plenty of hard rock aggression, but is firmly rooted in the pop experience that keeps the songs in your head. "It's Gonna Kill Me" has a stalker's vibe in its techno-metal roots, while "Take a Picture" and "Captain Bligh" are radio-friendly unit shifters that suggest that underneath the technology rests a beating, and often bruised, human heart.

What the Critics Say:
Second album from alternative rock act led by Richard Patrick. Co-founder Brian Liesegang. When Filter first surfaced in 1995 with their industrial-rock album Short Bus, they confirmed expectations by sounding like a second-rate Nine Inch Nails. Singer and guitarist Patrick had left Trent Reznor's band a year earlier to join forces with keyboard player Liesegang. Although the LP was a platinum success in America, Liesegang left to pursue a solo career and Patrick only made the occasional appearance on film soundtracks, scoring a Top 40 hit in the UK with the promising (Can't You) Trip Like I Do in October 1997 from the film Spawn. Title Of Record is the sound of Patrick ditching his past and finding his own style, a mixture of hazy FM vocals, corrosive guitars, psychedelic loops, restrained NIN-otronics and mud-hurling lyrics about a failed relationship. Although Cancer broods with an unhealthy glamour and features Smashing Pumpkin D'Arcy Wretzky on backing vocals, Patrick sounds euphoric on the chorus to Welcome To The Fold, and the wry, semi-acoustic Take A Picture relates the everyday occurrence of being drugged-up and naked on an aeroplane. By: Steve Malins

Disc: 1:

1. Sand
2. Welcome To The Fold
3. Captain Bligh
4. It's Gonna Kill Me
5. Best Things, The
6. Take A Picture
7. Skinny
8. I Will Lead You
9. Cancer
10. I'm Not The Only One
11. Miss Blue