G&P Review: Noisebazooka (With Bonus D.E.R. Goodness)

Noisebazooka
Humped World
Everyday Hate
Humped World sucks.
I'm sorry. There's just no nice way to say that. I can't really tiptoe around it. It's an excruciatingly bad album. I listened to it for weeks trying to find some redeeming quality to mitigate the crap aftertaste, but the tragic truth is Noisebazooka have created an album that is awful in just about every way a record can suck.
Humped World is less a bazooka of noise than it is grindcore vuvuzela: insistent, unrelenting and increasingly strident the longer it drags out. The Austrian twopiece's first mistake is shoving the generic and monotonous drum machine so far to the front of the mix. It smothers everything else going on with the album in a dense droning of unchanging mechanical beats. When you think about the insane effort and detail somebody like Scott Hull puts into his robotic drumming, it's almost insulting to hear something this amateurish. I don't know if drum machines come with a grindcore pre-set, but that's what Humped World sounds like. It's the most boring mechanical blastbeats churned out with at high velocity and with minimal variety.
The monotony of the drumming and the boring (if largely unintelligible) riffs and dull screaming only get more irritating as the 43 minute runtime just creeps on by. This album is just Way. Too. Fucking. Long. Maybe if they'd kept themselves to a five minute EP, Noisebazooka might have been tolerable but completely forgettable. But at 32 songs, each boring moment and musical mishap gets magnified as they are repeated and dragged out and proven to be intentional. Amateurishness can sometimes lend a wonderful, juvenile spontaneity to music, but more often than not amateurishness is just disappointing and embarrassing for everyone involved.
By the time Humped World farts itself out with 10 minutes of burbling noise nonsense (and you already know how I feel about that) in the shape of "Winterlandscapes," I've lost my capacity for outrage and disappointment.


D.E.R.
Quando A Esperanca Desaba
Everyday Hate
Just so we don't end on an entirely negative note, Everyday Hate have also reissued D.E.R.'s Quando A Esperanca Desaba on CD for those of you missed out on Nerve Altar's very sweet vinyl version from a couple years ago. My opinion of this one hasn't changed in the slightest.
This Brazilian band is not breaking any new ground in the realm of speedy, traditional grind that obviously nods back to From Enslavement to Obliteration. However, taken on its own terms, Quando A Esperanca Desaba is a hell of a lot of fun.
Skip Noisebazooka and check this one out instead.

[Full disclosure: Everyday Hate sent me review copies.]

G&P Review: D.E.R.

D.E.R.
Quando A Esperanca Desaba
Nerve Altar
If grindcore ever codified its equivalent of lofi black metal, Brazil’s D.E.R. would be running with wolves, standing backlit in foggy forests and generally trying to pretend the last 20 years of musical evolution just didn’t happen. Quando A Esperanca Desaba (roughly, When Hope Collapses) sounds like it was vomited forth from the bowels of Venom’s rehearsal space in Mantis’ mom’s basement somewhere back in 1977. Instead it’s being reissued on vinyl from 2008.
And for all I can tell D.E.R. (not to be confused with the derp) slapped the same song on this LP 16 times in a row, and I couldn’t give a shit if they did. D.E.R. are not a band overly concerned with niceties like dynamics, slow parts, vocals that are intelligibly human or making songs sound unique. They’re too busy grinding the shit outta your lower intestine to care. Every song starts in medias res and doesn’t end so much as just stop. A deep breath and it’s on to the next neck-cracker. The guitars are gristly knots of overdriven unintelligibility, the vocals indecipherable and the drums pound away, fighting not to be swept away by the noise.
Described like that, Quando A Esperanca Desaba sounds like a discordant mess (and to a certain extent it is), but there’s a spontaneity and intensity at work that shoves the music higher than it has any right to go. There are plenty of established grind bands that lack half the urgency these Brazilians are packing. Though it’s far from original or even acquainted with conventional definitions of well produced, D.E.R., in the immortal words of Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, have guts, and sometimes that’s enough.
[Full disclosure: Nerve Altar sent me a review copy.]