Though you could say that hard rock and heavy metal never really went away, no one can deny that for a good while in the 1990s, heavy music was mostly relegated to its own dark little hole just below the mainstream radar. Then suddenly it all came back to the charts darker, more depressed, and more pissed off than ever. Metairie’s Lowerline follows in this trend on The Clearer I See, their latest full-length, but manages to sound a bit fresher than the current crop of nu-metal wannabes polluting the modern-rock airwaves. (Maybe because they don’t try to rap? The last thing New Orleans needs is its own answer to Limp Bizkit.) If anything, with singer Matt Mysing’s emotional lyrics and delivery and the acoustic-electric dynamic on songs like “Listen to Me” and “No Worries,” Lowerline reminds me most of Staind. In fact, if you are a fan of that band, I guarantee that you will love this CD. Granted, that may take off points in the originality department, but it works well, and given the high quality of the recording, I could just hear this in the middle of an episode of the new Headbangers Ball. Hell, with the proto-Metallica feel they conjure on “Passed this Life,” I could almost picture them on the old Headbangers Ball! And that is probably where Lowerline succeeds and most of their contemporaries fail.