Apparently Tim Lambesis was just warming us all up with the suck of his joke band Austrian Death Machine's debut, because a year later he's back, with Double Brutal, another album of disposable 'humor' celebrating the most famous action hero of the 80s and 90s, a direct 'sequel' which might qualify for a straight to video release if I hadn't already gnashed the reel in my teeth. Did the world really need this? Wasn't the first album quite enough, and do you really feel like there's enough material to squeeze out another album of nonsense based on Arnold Schwarzenegger film quotes? Didn't anyone ever see the movie Wall E? Do we want or future to look like the first segment of that movie? Who green lit this artistically and comically null detritus?Lambesis himself had become more competent by this point, and once again ably performs all the instruments and vocals, joined yet again by a host of metalcore guitar players from bands like The Human Abstract, All Shall Perish, Unearth, and Darkest Hour, all cross promoting their own bands while contributing to this way cool project! Or maybe they just owed the creator some drug money from mutual tours of the past. By this point, we've already got the energetic but insufficient riffing of Total Brutal to add upon, and the sophomore album doesn't exactly fails in this ambition. The songs are in general more thrash focused, though the gang shouts remain on tracks like "See You at the Party Richter" (which sports a decent Chris Storey solo) or the post-intro opener "I Need Your Clothes, Your Boots, and Your Motorcycles". The cheesy palm mute mosh riffs remain, but at least a few of them sport some decent thrash riff accompaniment in the tradition of the Goat of a Thousand Breakdown Bands, Slayer, which is unsurprisingly one of the band's biggest influences.
For jokes this time out, we get a guttural/death metal parody skit/song combo called "Hey Cookie Monster, Nothing is as BRutal as Neaaahh" and "Who Told You You Could Eat My Cookies?" which is downright awful. Cookie Monster jokes in references to death metal are about as tactful and humorous as...Arnold Schwarzenegger parodies in 2009, and though the lead guitar tries to make up some ground, the super guttural breakdown was just fucking inevitable. There's a skit here to reference the first album, called "Who Is Your Daddy, and What Does He? 2" which might as well be called "Who Cares, No one Will Remember that this Was Not Funny By Tomorrow". "Conan, What is Best in Life?" seems like a fairly straight tribute to the famous lines from Conan the Barbarian until the douchebag reference line 'You want to know what is best in metal...it's a guitar solo...oh yeah!' before guest Jason Suecof rips into his lead. Perhaps the best song on the album musically is "Come on Cohaagen, Give Deez People Ehyar".
But Double Brutal is called Double Brutal for a reason beyond the fact that it's the sophomore and has opposing faces of the Terminator and...Lambinator on the cover. It's also a Double Album, and the second disc is largely metalcore/ thrash covers of songs by Judas Priest, Misfits, Metallica, Megadeth, and Motörhead, all pretty safe and standard, none possessing any of the charm of their original incarnations since they're splattered in all kinds of shitty metalcore vocals and clownish background accompaniment. The Lemmy vocals in particular are heinously embarrassing. More unique would be the covers of Goretorture (a Finnish band who used to use Arnold movie samples in their music, very clever Tim), Agnostic Front, but then, these are equally lame in their delivery. Think of listening to Killswitch Engage's pathetic Dio cover about 7 or 8 times in a row, and that sums up the majority of the musical content to this disc. There are also some skits here, which are, surprise surprise, not at all funny. The only actual track on this disc worth hearing would be the metalized version of the Terminator 2 theme. Lambesis could just have well recorded this, posted it to his personal MySpace or Facebook or whatever, and then called it a day without ever putting these albums out and I might have been happy.
Double Brutal was an entirely unnecessary effort from a joke that still lacks a punchline. Perhaps if Austrian Death Machine had manifested in just the debut, it would be a little more forgivable, but this is like having your remains tread on by a tank after already being stung to death by annoying wasps. It's about as useful as tits on a bull, or a fish on a bicycle, or tits on a bicycle. Okay, strike that last one, because watching a pair of double brutal boobs bounce on a bicycle would be infinitely more entertaining than listening to this album. A few of the riffs on Disc 1 are decent, the metal T2 theme is fun enough, but the rest of the 56 minutes is a flat tire waiting to happen.
Verdict: Fail [2.25/10] (get ready to not get pumped)
http://www.austriandeathmachine.com/
No comments:
Post a Comment