Insane Clown Posse – The Tempest (2007)

January 30, 2024

Free from the Joker’s Card legacy, ICP was rudderless and without direction. Let’s just be honest; that’s how it was. Or, at least, that’s how it seemed at the time. I loved both Wraith albums as a teenager. I thought both of them were fantastic for completely different reasons. But when The Calm dropped, I was bored to tears. And then, The Tempest came a few years later and I could not have been more bored and disinterested. It was like ICP with the soul sucked out of it. 

Recently I have relistened to this period of the band, which is arguably fully responsible for me falling off of ICP for over a decade. Whilst The Calm held up pretty well in retrospect, The Tempest does not. The Tempest is bloated, directionless and well, boring. Which sucks ass because the production on this thing is huge. I’m not sure where Mike E Clark ends and Fritz The Cat begins, or where the overlap lies, but there’s an extra sting in the tail when there’s so much talent and expertise stacked up behind an album that just fucking sucks.

There are exceptions of course, “News at 6 O’Clock”, “The Tower” and “Mexico City” are pretty cool, but as a whole, this album blows.