Here's something I've come to notice: If I spend more time thinking of an album than listening to it, it'll usually mean that I like it way more than what's considered socially acceptable. For instance, I have this ritual of pulling out the Worlds Beyond the Veil CD and staring at it for a while, and then putting it back in with the rest of the CDs, all the while having a disturbingly happy expression. For the record, last time I listened to Worlds Beyond the Veil from first track to last was in June. The music within the release is so valuable to me that I avoid using it for its original intent, out of fear of having it ruined forever. Also, I prefer not listening to it because I don't like feeling disappointed. Yes, I am implying that it's about time I found a new favorite album ever.
Which brings us to Meatus's Inner Demons twofold. First, because this is not going to be my new all time favorite album, and second, because of how I know that. Without even getting into the musical aspect of the album yet, I'll mention the thing about knowing if I really love an album again. Like I said, if I spend more time thinking about an album than hearing it, it's usually because I adore it. And I stress the word “usually”, because there is one exception, and that being when an album is absolutely terrible. Inner Demons fits into this second category like a glove: ever since I first listened to it, I have thought about it daily, and then proceeded to have variable amounts of success at suppressing a need to burst out laughing. In fact, it fits so well into this latter category that it just so happens to be the new worst album I've ever listened to. Needless to say, I'm practically jumping with joy.
You see, being outrageously terrible is more challenging than being pretty-bad-to-okayish. You need to have some sort of idea of the rules to follow to make an acceptable release, and then you need to have the guts to consciously disregard them. I'm not saying that Anal Cunt are more talented than Nouvelle Vague, but, then again, I totally am. And Meatus know they're mildly talented. They know it so well that they use every opportunity they can to show off their uncanny ability of playing more than one genre. In the mean time, they only sacrifice a few unimportant things, such as sense of progression, dynamics, and being listenable. The result of this attempt at ultra-originality is a mix of some of the least interesting riffs in the history of death metal with a wad of the worst characteristics of every genre to have emerged in the last 40 years or so, all carefully arranged together by a tornado.
To give you a quick example, I'll describe the intro on the first track, which goes by the name of “Slave – Do It, End It All Now”. Oh, and have I mentioned the names of the songs here? They range from things like “Yeast – Societies Outcast”, to “G.H.B. - Sex Drugs Rock-n-Roll-n-Humility”, to the particularly clever “Spoken – ConfusionCONFUSIONnoisufnoc???”, but I digress. The opening song starts with (*gasp*) a piano sample playing (*GASP*) an arpeggio. Then, after a few repetitions, (*massive heart attack*) a clean guitar begins following the piano very badly while there's a sample of an e-mail about taking care of kids and hating the guts out of another person speaking on top. Randomly, the guitarist hits the distortion and begins to make some guitary noises. This whole sequence prolongs for the whole length of the e-mail about going to scouts with your son, giving guitar lessons, dance , and checking the daughter's FUCKING homework, before the whole thing settles down, leaving only the piano to play a few melancholic notes before being cut out mid-phrase, as a way to introduce the listener to the mega-dramatic death-metally / boring-beyond-comprehension introductory riff. And that's when the album begins to show off its extreme intensity and skull-crushing power by segueing into a post rock interlude for no apparent reason other than taking up space. Just as you start noticing how good Meatus are with post rock, the song cuts to a hip hop sample of someone saying “You don't like how I'm living, well, fuck you”, and we're back at the very uninteresting death metal. It takes one more introductory riff to actually get to the main theme, and all this amounts to an intro that in total takes up 3:30 minutes of the 7:56 minute song, and is completely unfulfilled.
All in all, the detours that are taken along the way eventually begin to sound like the band is making fun of you, and you wish they would stop doing them. But when the detours are not taken, the band has more of a chance to let shine through their complete inability to make a consistently engaging riff progression. A good example of this is “Ribo – Drugs Can't Erase The Memories”, which starts out relatively tolerable, until you realize that every single riff is a random combination of power chords an 11-year old could come up with by having a coughing fit, and that the order at which they're presented only makes them more torturous. The song is rendered even more terrible by the fact that every song prior and after that one is pretty much the same in that aspect. I think the fault here is of the guitars. They're so uninspired that they drag everyone else down to their level. The vocalist is quite skillful, the bass sometimes makes some cool chops and the drummer should have been looking for a better band in the first place, but the guitars are just lame! I think there are only about three worthwhile guitar parts in the whole album, and one of them sounds like the Batman theme.
I guess these guys were trying to out-weird and out-experimental everything else in existence and decided to do so in the cheapest, easiest and most gimmicky way possible. And I have to say that, in their own way, they have succeeded. Inner Demons IS absolutely bizarre. Its production is some of the most subtly perplexing I've heard yet, and the premise itself is a recipe for something of at least mild interest, meanwhile in execution it's even more tedious than James LaBrie's Elements of Persuasion. It really makes you stop and think, the way that something so chock-full of surprises and unexplained twists can sum up to something more boring than silence itself. How does that even work?! With this, my conclusion is the following: don't let my rating discourage you. Find this album and listen to it. If you have ever stopped to stare at a car accident, or considered doing so, this ought to spark your interest.
Standout tracks:
Spoken – ConfusionCONFUSIONnoisufnoc???
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