Austrian Death Machine - Jingle All the Way (2011)

It's a digital single, with an extremely limited physical release with bonus track in tow. If we're lucky, proceeds from this might end up in some charity, for those suffering the handicaps that the creator of Austrian Death Machine also seems to harbor. It dirties me just to think a thought like that, but what I'm getting at is thinly veiled code for: this completely sucks. Granted, Tim Lambesis probably did not intend for this to ever be taken seriously, but the joke has now grown tired and old to the point where lichen has grown upon it, and its delivery was never very amusing in the first place: lift samples from Arnold Schwarzenegger films, apply them to badly written metalcore breakdowns and wholly forgettable modern 'thrash' riffs, awful growl vocals and profit off anyone whose standards are so absent that they'd actually get a chuckle out of it.

As you can no doubt tell, I was not a fan of either Total or Double Brutal, the Austrian Death Machine full-lengths to this point, some of the tritest gimmickry and unfunny nonsense I've come across in the past few years. Unfortunately, what I'm hearing on this holiday single is even worse than those efforts, 100% void of ideas or even compelling derivations. Factory produced, plastic poseur manure which can't even evince laughter in any ironic sense. This isn't so bad that it's somehow miraculously fun or entertaining, it's just bad. "I'm Not a Pervert" switches off from bad, brickhouse Pantera groove chugging and Anselmo vocals to vapid growling and groove breakdowns for the LCD, and about the only thing that I can say is not completely detritus would be the leads, which might have deserved placement in a far better song. "It's Turbo Time" is hardly any better, with almost a NYHC undercurrent to the angry Sick of It All vocals and the faster paced crossover/thrashing with such dull, repetitive and pedestrian notation that I might have nightmares just thinking of it...

And then, that breakdown with the shouts? Forget about it, what a terrible lack of creativity. A faster, but more methodic lead is shoved in here at the last minute which isn't even as compelling as the other one. The final track, "Who Told You You Could Eat My cookies?" is slower paced, functioning on a foundation of effortless asshat grooves with spikes of arpeggio leads above them, but even if it's mildly less shit than the other tracks, it's still fertilizer. None of the mock Arnold samples anywhere here are funny anymore. In fact, I fail to see why I should even be laughing at 80s action hero films when it's not like I can head down to the theater these days and see any that are really any better. We might have CGI and 3D now, folks, but most of the shit still sucks, and even worse, because no one seems to have learned from their 'mistakes', they've just shifted over to making new ones. Anyway, what's left to say? If you enjoy sterile, generic metalcore breakdowns and Vulgar Display of Power thrash bursts that Lambesis himself probably forgot three minutes after recording them, eat your heart out: You are terrible. THIS is terrible. Just connect the dots.

Verdict: Epic Fail [.5/10]

http://www.austriandeathmachine.com/

Austrian Death Machine - Double Brutal (2009)

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/

Austrian Death Machine - Total Brutal (2008)

As a youth and teen, I grew up in an era when people actually looked forward to each Arnold Schwarzenegger film with baited anticipation, because once upon time they were usually great fun, and showed all the innocence of film-making which seems to have died out in the big budget green screen revolution. Commando, Predator, The Running Man, Conan the Barbarian, and the first two Terminator films are in my opinion the best he's done, and still entertaining views over two decades in the future, where we find ourselves in a cynical age just as short on taste as any criticisms one might have leveled at the 80s and the Austrian bodybuilder whose career went supernova. Obviously, the accent and rather one-dimensional roles the man was handed were catalysts to a massive, nigh unending cycle of parody at the hands of comedians, celebrities and really just about everyone you know...

How many of us have exclaimed 'I'll be back!' or 'Get to tha choppa!' out loud, even at random, in our lifetimes? Arnold is a household name around most of the world, and if there's an exception, it must be some place without electricity, or another dimension, because even the deaf, dumb and blind know of this man's exploits on screen. By the 21st century, this is beyond played out, and Schwarzenegger impersonators have long since ceased being cool or funny. Someone forgot to mention this to Tim Lambesis, frontman for the crappy Christian metalcore band As I Lay Dying, because he decided to streamline his personal entry into the latest thrash trend with an all out Schwarzenegger parody, or should I say a tribute, interspersing bits of original dialog using a half-decent Arnold voice with a faceless mesh of youth hardcore, modern Slayer-like thrash riffing, gang shouts, overbearing metalcore vocals akin to his other band, and breakdowns.

It's actually impressive to an extent that Lambesis laid down all the groundwork for this record himself, demo'ing the instruments and then having friends come along to compensate for his own shortcomings by redubbing some of the specific guitar and drum tracks. Fair enough. He also brought on a host of metalcore guitarists like Adam Dutkiewicz of Killswitch Engage, Nick Hipa of As I Lay Dying and even Jason Suecof, studio wizard and guitarist of Capharnaum & Crotchduster, to add some guitar solos to the material. Most of the song titles are lifted from movie quotes featuring the Governator, and between these we get a few awful dialog sequences of Arnold's impersonator going through the band motions, skits similar to something you might find on some terrible hip hop record, only not as funny.

The problem of course is that a parody band must be funny, and Austrian Death Machine is not at all fucking funny. This is like the pitiful comedian you see at some gig, trying to rely on the old Arnold impersonator shtick because he cannot actually write an original joke to save himself. Musically, there is nothing of value unless you really think the Cro-Mags, Madball and shitty post-80s Slayer need an update to 21st century studio standards. Whether it's the hardcore meets shred indulgence of "You Have Just Been Erased", the Municipal Waste meet Earth Crisis stomper "Here is Zero, Now Plain Zero" or the terrible thrashing Slayercore of "If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It", there is simply nothing memorable beyond the fact that it's tight, in time and performed with some degree of competence. A few of the riffs like the choppy thrashing in "Who Is Your Daddy, and What Does He Do" or "Rubber Baby Buggy Bumpers" might have actually worked with better vocals and no hardcore injection, but they're simply disposable in this context.

Almost all the songs have some horribly derivative metalcore breakdown from the days when Earth Crisis and peers reigned and already wrote them all, and I really cannot abide by Tim's vocals, which are your dime a dozen angry metalcore overkill which sounds like a mix of Phil Anselmo and Karl Buechner, with a little NY slant like Lou Koller of Sick of It All thrown in for good measure. The guest solos, while not technically unsound, are merely tripe dressing for the lame procession of songs that fly straight in one ear and out the other like a bazooka shell, only you don't gain the benefit of dying and escaping the stain this record leaves on your conscious. But even lamer, so much lamer than any of this is the self-referential diatribe Lambesis has in some of the skits, or the disclaimer that the album is somehow above criticism because its a joke band. Are you kidding me?

'Wait a second, I gotta try out my new delay pedal...' No one cares, brutal guy. You are not funny. Arnold's 'new song ' title in the "Broo-Tall Song Idea" is not funny, even if you half-ass Cookie Monster guttural vocals along to it. What the fuck, did you get this idea while hanging out with skater bois for a Mountain Dew commercial shoot?

Perhaps some Honcho at Metal Blade got a kick out of this concept, or perhaps they thought it was the right time to strike and turn a few more bucks in the nu-Thrash-xplosion! The Arnold Schwarzenegger thrash tribute band was really inevitable in a sudden rebirth of 80s worship in extreme music, and really I'm surprised it hadn't been done before to this extent. I might argue that Austrian Death Machine is superior to As I Lay Dying, but that's like arguing that a poop joke is more effective than a whoopie cushion. They're both perfectly effective fun for a six year old kid, but their impact grows a little sour through adolescence. Of course, if you're six, you can probably skip out on this review, go buy the album, the t-shirt and if mommy's got the change, maybe even a mouse pad or the McDonald's theme Happy Meal. Make sure you get two straws, because this sucks enough for both.

Verdict: Fail [2.75/10] (no, screw YOU)

http://www.austriandeathmachine.com/