28mm Lobes
I believe life is a unending, unordered, series of random uncontrollable events.
Music is the only thing that never lets me down.
I'm always broke, yet I manage with the little i have.
Look, I’m just going to come right out and say it so 99 percent of you can skip ahead to the next review: Listening to the ADD-addled nocturnal emissions of Iwrestledabearonce is less enticing than huffing a bag full of doggie farts. The toe-curling irony in these song titles alone puts an entire bookshelf of McSweeney’s releases to shame, and history has already revealed that “Dillinger Escape Plan crossed with [insert something you enjoy even less here]” is a recipe for overindulgent and underwhelming results. Still, Decibel prefers to direct its righteous indignation at things that unequivocally suck, like the “screamo-crunk explosion,” rock bands covering ’80s songs, Juggalo culture, hooded drone monks and, oh yeah, Stuck Mojo.
The mix of genres and styles on the group’s full-length debut isn’t entirely artless—it takes a sort of stoner ingenuity to come up with ridiculous samples and brass balls to drop ’em into the middle of a song without prior warning or justification. Like, the Reveille horn at the end of “Tastes Like Kevin Bacon” might be cool if it didn’t render the br00tal shredding, Cristina Scabbia breaks and the 8-bit loops utterly redundant, and/or didn’t presage something equally retarded, like a horse neighing. If Iwrestledabearonce sounded a little more like Melt-Banana during the Melt-Banana parts, or ripped off Landmine Marathon with even an ounce more guile, this wouldn’t come across as such a fraudulent and tiresome enterprise. Forget about what this means for Western Civilization for the present—imagine a future when this becomes someone’s idea of retro kitsch. Van flip!
Of the approximately 10,000 bands Metal Blade signed in the past two years, Trigger the Bloodshed stood out. Despite short hair and the occasional breakdown, these Englishmen basically played straight-up death metal—a rarity in today’s deathcore-crazy climate. Last year’s debut, Purgation, was tight, precise and admirably concise. Song lengths mostly stayed under three minutes, and solos were scarce. The band seemingly tried to stuff death metal songs into grindcore sacks. These little packets of blast-beaten joy promised greater things ahead.
The Great Depression sort of delivers on this promise. The band has learned a lot in the year since Purgation. Their chops are even sharper, and the songwriting is more “mature,” i.e., more complicated. Now songs last about a minute longer than before. They undergo hectic riff salad-ry, with an undercurrent of half-time, doomy darkness—Cannibal Corpse meets Aeon. But they haven’t mastered all the fancy weaponry they’ve acquired. The presentation is enjoyable, but it doesn’t add up to anything. Few riffs stick; few hooks sink. This is the girl with whom you have a pleasant first date, but never see again.
The mastering is partly to blame. It’s loud, harsh and artificial; the girl is trying too hard. Underneath the makeup, you can tell there’s a real human being, but she’s “on” all the time, and it’s grating. Albums should not sound this pumped up. “Everything louder than everyone else” is a cute catchphrase, but it makes records sound like crap.
The Devil Wears Prada? Was The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2 already taken? Anyway, this band somehow exists and their new album is With Roots Above and Branches Below, and it’s just… seriously, it’s like I’m reviewing a band comprised of aliens who wrote music on some distant planet that sucks.
I can see it now: The band throws darts at a board sectioned into “chugging metal garbage,” “chugging metal garbage with pinch harmonics,” “pathetic, 12th-generation At the Gates riff” or “shameful emo-pop chorus.” The last one takes up half the board. These are grown men singing Avril Lavigne parts that blond girls whose parents own a beach house listen to when their bag of dicks boyfriend makes out with a different skank.
Even if Altars of Madness-era Morbid Angel supplied the metal side, the constant shuddering pop-rock is enough to justify burying this record under 100 pounds of bear traps. And I don’t know why a band with such slick production would use super shitty-sounding keyboards, but maybe that’s them being punk as fuck.
Parents, if you want your baby to grow up stupid and a pussy with an annoying haircut who always talks about the next gauge they’re getting in their ears or something, buy With Roots Above. Oh, and I guess the Devil Wears Prada are Christian, so if you adore fucking terrible music, but hate bands that use their “faith” to push records, this is kind of a coin toss.
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