AMG Review of Opaque Brotherhood

Stewart Mason
All Music Guide

Part of the extended family surrounding the Insane Clown Posse, Dark Lotus are an on-again, off-again supergroup consisting of the ICP, their protégés Twiztid, and solo act Blaze Ya Dead Homie. (Ex-member Anybody Killa is nowhere to be found, having left the circle under bad terms in 2006.) At this point in the group's career, any difference between Dark Lotus and the participants' home bands is fairly minimal: woozy, semi-psychedelic beats (some of them slowed down in the Houston style) and dark, often violent horror-themed lyrics predominate, as always. The goofy humor that's the other key part of the Psychopathic Records dichotomy is all but absent here, though: character sketches like the murderous "Heinous" and the suicidal "Falling" are presented completely straight -- or as straight as people who regularly dress like evil clowns can get, anyway -- and with a more prominent moralistic tone than before. Perhaps incidents like that of a Massachusetts teenager whose 2006 multi-state murder spree was connected in press accounts to his membership in the so-called Juggalo subculture have caused the participants in Dark Lotus to make it as clear as possible that they're not in favor of violence and depravity. Nothing on The Opaque Brotherhood will convince anyone who isn't already a fan, but the tormented lyrics and matter-of-fact delivery remove a layer or two of distance and artifice from the band's familiar themes, and make them that much more disturbing as a result.