Band Of Skulls - Sweet Sour

 


I'd face a total of zero problems writing a list of things that do not, in any physical or metaphorical way, kill you or make you stronger. But that would mean that I'd have to stick a bunch of filler in anticipation to listing this album. Band Of Skulls seem to wholeheartedly agree with the adaptation of the ignorance-bliss theory to the active asininity paradigm, the one that effectively simplifies all that defines stupidity into the stylish four-letter acronym YOLO. So essentially what I'm saying is that you learn absolutely nothing and your outlook on music changes in no way whatsoever from listening to Sweet Sour a bunch of times. This album came out a few months ago, so to quicken things up, I'll explain right away why this review isn't completely irrelevant from my perspective. I bought this album on a whim because the cover is fantastic, thinking that I could at least have a laugh if it were bad. So this is a personal vendetta: I want either my laugh, or my time among the living, or my parents' money back. Since I can't really be contacted directly, I suppose I'll stick to recovering the laugh.

And things don't really start out well for me, because to describe the sound here is to describe the sound of your neighbor's band for any hermit readers out there, which is a rather dull and insulting waste of time, another strike by this landfill of a bunch of sonic information. All the people out there who upon meeting another individual for the first time state, unsolicited, that they have a band that should be checked out by said new acquaintance, via Myspace, no less, use this sound in their music. It is the kind of sound you get either from the desire to get lucky or the desire to get lucky and famous, meanwhile not being sure how either of the scenarios are supposed to work out. The only difference is that the second scenario somehow actually worked out for Band of Skulls. There's a review of this very album on the guardian dot coe dot you kay, I'll have you know! I've no opinion of their previous endeavors with the exception of unconscious bias, but I end up with the idea that they got where they are by following the same “rock out here; stick out lighters here; we compose everything drunk during rehearsals; sing-along chorus here; dynamics out the window” ethos that your neighbor's band follows.

Same simplified old-schoolish rockish sound with riffs that you've heard in your head when you were taking a shit at the train station that one time, accompanied by all the proficient and bland instrumentation and sounds you can get out of a bunch of money and an ordinary old-schoolish rockish band line-up. And that's when they're not doing generic ballads you get from jamming for some minutes and then coming back the next day to add finishing touches. I bet they even send text messages with their lyrics to their “fans”, blegh. They must be the kind of people whose hobby it is to claim that “music nowadays sucks I wish I was born in the 60s so I could be even more smug than I am right now Nicki Minaj hurr hurr”. I'm led to assume that the album cover is a photo of my opinion of them, moments after it escaped my esophagus. They irritate me so much that my bile is bloody, try to top that!

Of course, I wouldn't want to send the wrong message across. If Band Of Skulls are reading this, they can sigh with relief. I haven't vomited in years, so I wouldn't actually know anything about my bile by now. As for Sweet Sour, it's hateful, but not actually bad. It's completely average. Bang in the middle of the bell curve of album quality and totally not worth your time. It's better during the first half and reveals its true nature when the bass distortion kicks in on “Lay My Head Down” to play an extremely boring sequence of intervals, followed by a disappointing “heartfelt” bluesy guitar solo. After that moment, you can't help but imagine the smug looks on these guys' faces as they indulge in their belief that they're utterly brilliant. I'm not basing my score on such childish factors as my unfounded and stupid opinion that these guys be obnoxious fucks, but the conviction with which they choose to be generic and uninspired and the insistence to disregard dynamics in favor of being even more obnoxious fucksy is simply depressing.

“Navigate” was excellent until it completely failed to go anywhere. “Bruises” seems to have a cool opening riff for the sole purpose of not trying the listener's patience too much. “Lies” must have been written mid-concert, during the process of playing “Lies”. “Hometowns” appears to have been picked from a catalog of stock indie songs and yet is one of the album's highlights. “Close to Nowhere” is a totally useless but pleasant little thingy that should have been an interlude or something. Meanwhile, they stick to the simplest and most default song structure in the existence of rock music and still manage to fuck it up notoriously a couple of times. At least there are a few okay songs to even things out, and sometimes it actually sounds like they tried. I'd dare to even say that “You're Not Pretty but you Got it Going On” is great, and “Wanderluster” is not far behind. Then again, your neighbor's band also has its couple of good tunes, am I right or am I not so right?

As for the mindset that I assumed Band of Skulls follow on the first paragraph, you do only live once, so you should most definitely seize the day and do something important. And that implies not wasting time listening to the nth repetition of an underachieving chorus. I do just that so that you don't have to because, as you know, I have no life. This is a 2.5 out of 5 album, which means that you have no reason to listen to it to know how good or how bad music can get, and it's not even all that enjoyable. Stick to appreciating the album cover.

Standout tracks:
Sweet Sour
Wanderluster
You're Not Pretty But You Got it Going On
Hometowns

Wormeaten - Tortured Cadaveric Humanity

(PROTIP: if you're in a hurry, don't read my reviews; if you hate reading, like I do, skip the first two paragraphs and be amazed at the lack of context)

I think it's pretty obvious by now that Brutal Death Metal, and to some extent modern Death Metal in general, are pretty much completely detached from the original genre they spawned from. Sure, we have the “retro” kind of releases here and there, Rotten Death or The Dominant being gleaming examples *sarcastic cough for those not brain-dead enough to intentionally read my drivel*,  but they mostly seem to be just as pathetic as the 2nd generation Glam Metal bands that are actually 1st generation Glam Metal bands hiding behind an HD band pic and loudness war. The really important stuff, the kind that has more thought than fanboyism injected into its creative process, seems to have moved very far from the Sabbathian way that birthed it.

You won't hear a hail of melodies anymore. You won't hear one memorable riff supporting an entire song. You won't hear solos that stick to your unconscious and cause insomnia when you're reminded of them. Nowadays, you don't hear a powerful wail from the vocal cord person. You don't have the right for the comfort of knowing what the hell is going on. Malignancy, Mitochondrion, Ulcerate, Wormeaten and such are still definitely Death Something, just nothing resembling Metal, or even Rock, for that matter. If I had it my way, I'd actually have these bands be called Death Something and let the Bloodbaths and Tormenteds of the world stick to their precious suffix. I honestly don't mind, as long as, time and again, Something proves itself to be an absolutely fascinating genre and way of thinking.

Wormeaten are a Brutal Death Something band from Colombia. Now that we're familiar with the band we can move on to their album. Actually, no. I'm the lead procrastinator in the play “Endrey's Social Circle”, so let's properly impersonate the character by first dissecting the prefix behind Death Something that I employed two sentences and a few commas earlier (I won't dissect “Death” only because that's a perspective on what music should be and a perspective is a human thing, meaning that it's full of fallacies right to the core and then some, so dissecting it would make me sad). “Brutal” is absolutely not necessarily a specific sound, it's more of an intention. A method of delivery, if you will. What I mean by this is that Brutal music can come in any shape and style it wants, as long as it coincides with the original objective of straining and just overall messing with the mind of the listener, although having the snare sound be terrible helps. Even more than classical music, Brutal music outright forbids a casual listen from the get-go. The sloppy production, the confusing playing, the loudness, the chaotic composition, it's not accidental. It's not the aggression that makes the music Brutal, it's the listener's necessity to make sense of it. It ends up being a high effort / high reward system, so that's an addictive element ingrained here as well. To sum up, once you properly dig into Brutal Death Something, you don't get out.

Meanwhile, this band I'm supposedly reviewing is removing all the unnecessary noise, all the layers of residual Metal left behind, bit by bit, until the pure embodiment of this form of artistic expression I totally just pulled out of my ass is branded deep into the hippocampus. These guys are all that is subtle and misleading that comes with being Brutal. Beginning with the traditional shitty b-movie sample intro, Tortured Cadaveric Humanity lures the listener in with a relatively competent dose of BDS/M (contain your adolescence). Then, with each song, they alter their sound a bit, until by the last track we're left to savor the controlled and mechanical abstraction of the riffs and the pulsating quality brought on by the spastic songwriting. It's similar to having a manipulative acquaintance who with every calculated move dominates every aspect of your life and makes you their bitch. Anyone able to pull something so meticulous off in a musical form, even in the marginally half-assed manner we get here, is a genius.

Now allow me to explain what's half-assed about it. The first half is just pretty good, quite far from the holyfuckingshitthisisflawless-ness of the second. The songwriting ranges from absolute brilliant employment of micro-riffs and fills, not to mention some incredible skills in theme development, to some rather serious occasional structure and dynamic problems, lazy slam placement and a slight overall blocky feel in some of the tracks, particularly “Dismembered Victims”. Which is weird, considering that dynamics and slams are also the album's strongest points in other places. That tiny pause in “Rusty Chains And Claustrophobia” which then leads to the main riff gets me every time. And some of the riffs, wow, are they awesome, and some of the riffs, wow, are they just okay.

So what we get is an impression of what Wormeaten were seeking to do, which has to marinate for a long time before making sense, meanwhile there's “Dismembered Victims” and one misplaced riff in “Ground Human Flesh” ruining your day every time. Luckily, the experience just gets better and better, so there's an incentive to keep listening. And when you hear the breakdown at the end of “Internal Killer”, you know these guys have style. By the way, the BDS/M thing from earlier, it's Brutal Death Something / Metal, just in case you got amused.

Standout tracks:

Crying Cadaverine
Rusty Chains and Claustrophobia
Internal Killer
Wormeaten