Will Monk’s Manic Melodies – 1/5
http://www.mediafire.com/?mlnitwmmnuzSo Will was right, it has been a while since I’ve written anything (that goes for all three blogs I currently update). Perhaps through indifference of the subjects (certainly, I’ve been catching up with ‘Lone Wolf and Cub’ and various TV shows) and perhaps through becoming even lazier than usual. Which is certainly not a good thing. So, since a review was requested on this topic, to get me alive and errr…typing? Once more, a rather ‘informal review’ that is not to go onto the blog. The lack of a picture, as well as no official title beyond the one I spent all of 3 seconds devising are both factors in this decision. Expect it short, sharp, sweet, followed by my fist extracting the still beating heart of this effort, only to discover it looks vaguely like a
tribble.
Yes, sparing no expense for ‘friends’ (pah), this is fairly awful when compared to professional recordings. The production is not so much badly done as it is varied; the guitars will come in relatively crisp and then the vocals will come in sounding like someone blowing bubbles through their milkshake. Altogether it could have benefited from being levelled out – whether all sounding grainy or all sounding crisp, but certainly not sounding like one half the band are trying to play through a crisp packet.
The drum machine is done terribly. In skilled hands they can be programmed to great effect (Genghis Tron and Big Black are masters of this art) but here it simply keeps a beat, and remains far enough in the back to rob the song of any bite it might have. The vocals aren’t particularly bad on the opening ‘bonded by insanity,’ acting as something of a centrepiece for the album, but are rather monotonous; a distinct lack of variation in pace and pitch, and whilst it certainly has the most going in within its duration, I’m not sure that works in its favour. With a guitar riff that sounds like it doesn’t know if it wants to be thrash or doom, interspersed with frustratingly annoying ‘ooh-eer-ooo’ sound guitar wails, it all sounds muddled. And don’t even get me started with the guitar tone on that solo; if you want to pretend your Kerry King and just whack up the gain, sound tinny and bash random notes go ahead, but then trying to pull of something with more melody with the same level of distortion, it’s just messy. All the practice in the world won’t help if you don’t clean your ears out first.
The rest of the EP suffers a mixture of good and bad. The vocals never really reach that good, but the guitars during the covers generally only suffer from the bad production, like an old vinyl that the dog chewed a little; it’ll still play, but it’s not as good as the original. ‘Holy Poser’ shows perhaps the only original and intriguing riff presented, even if nothing else could be done with it, and on the down side ‘chainmale’ sounds so dreadful that it could be replaced with white noise without anyone noticing if it weren’t for the occasional – poorly suited – clean guitar bit somewhere between basic shredding overpowering everything. So, final words? Yes, this is pretty awful. The production’s poorer than the rawest garage-made BM band, the riffs often feel confused and the odd combinations of styles sound dreadful. But at least its not Miley Cyrus.
Highlights: Holy Poser, Masked Jackal
And no, I didn't spend longer than 10 minutes on this. If theres a typo in it, bite me.
