Originality is a tough thing to track down and can be one harsh mistress when you believe you have cracked it. You pull what you think is an amazing idea out of the ether and go about putting it into motion only to find out someone beat you to it and has already cornered the market.
Question is, what do you do then? Do you admit defeat forget you grand plan and go back to what you did before or do you forage on, hoping that your version is bigger and better than the one that already exists?
Austrian Death Machine's first release
Total Brutality is a perfect example of this.
Let's start the story a couple of years back, a bunch of brave mavericks from San Francisco hit upon an idea that combined their love of Arnold Schwarzenegger, metal, punk and ballsy heroics.
They formed a band called Arnocorps and cleverly invented a mythology that the finest Hollywood screenwriters would be proud of. Their story is one of danger, action and true underground grit. They play songs based on ancient Austrian folklore such as the story of the Austrias most famous knight known only as Hans The Terminator and the epic tale of one mans struggle to protect his daughter that is Commando. They are fighting to reclaim these stories from the corrupt American film industry that has stolen and perverted them for their own personal gain.
Basically what that means is they play Punk/Thrash/Rock n Roll songs based on the Schwarzenegger movies with a singer who performs in the style of the Govenator himself. It's all brilliant fun with the tongue placed firmly in the cheek.
Now fast forward to the present day, Tim Lambesis, front man of unspeakably generic Metalcore band
As I Lay Dying decides to record a Thrash album of songs inspired by the works of Mr Schwarzenegger. Sounds slightly familiar doesn't it?
Tim claims that he had never heard of Arnocorps before recording the album and to be fair to him they aren't exactly well known (which is a damn shame in my opinion). He has also aimed his music for a more "metal "audience compared to The 'Corps punk oriented style. But for those in the know, the shadow of Arnocorps looms large over this release.
While Arnocorp's singer Hotzfeuer delivers each line with a thick Austrian brogue, Tim has chosen to sing in his normal style and get one of his mates in to do a pretty uninspired Arnie impersonation which crops up in interludes between the songs and also is used for occasional backing vocals.
The album contains seventeen tracks but only ten actual songs, the rest are dedicated to the aforementioned interludes. The album opens with one of these spoken word sections with our impersonator making some incredibly lame jokes about opening a 25 hour a day gym (for a whole extra hour of working out you see). Every single one of these tracks is deeply unfunny and highlights that while Tim knows his way around a recording studio, the writers of Saturday Night Live aren't gonna be calling him for advise any time soon.
The album also loses a mark straight away for having an interlude about being in a practice room with Arnold that fails to make an in-joke about John Practice from Last Action Hero (for all you proper Arnie fans out there, just how do you get to Carnegie Hall?)
Anyway the songs themselves are also pale impersonations of a certain style. Imagine if you will some fairly decent thrash riffs polluted with incessant use of one of my most hated musical styles, the dreaded hardcore beatdown.
Almost every bloody song on the record has a "heavy" moment where the thrashing stops and the grinding "tough guy" beatdowns start. While listening to the album each time it reached one of these sections I had to fight the urge to rip the Cd from the stereo and snap in two. This kind of thing may fool adolescents into thinking that they are listening to some extreme shit but for those of us who enjoy genuine song craft these attempts at faux-heaviness are just irritating.
It's a shame really as some of the riffs are actually not that bad and the production itself is excellent. The album is marked with a very heavy guitar tone and punishing drum sound that helps it gain a tougher edge. If Tim could write a thrash song that actually thrashes from start to end then there might be a point to this album.
Also his vocal style is extremely grating. He uses standard, tuneless "shouty" vocals mixed in with some pitiable death growls which wouldn't impress my gran. There is also a bit of clean singing on one of the tracks which I would have preferred him to keep in has day job.
All instrumentation on the album was taken care of by Tim apart from the guitar solo's which were provided by some of his Metalcore mates like Mark McDonald of Mercury Switch and Adam Dutkiewicz from Killswitch Engage (seriously, are their any Metalcore projects that this guy isn't involved in?) These are all admirably preformed and help ease the pain of sitting through the rest of the album a little.
The whole release was apparently thrown together in one week and this lack of polish in the song writing department is rather apparent. Having forced myself to listen to it several times, there is not one song that stands out as a fully perfected tune. Case in point would be
I Am A Cybernetic Organism, Living Tissue Over (Metal) Endoskeleton. It turns out the "Metal" in the title is in brackets because he couldn't quite fit the full quote into the chorus and just decided to record it like that anyway.
It's this sort of slapdash approach to recording the album which leaves it looking like nothing more than a half arsed attempt at having a laugh. If your a fan of Tim's main band then you may find some enjoyment in this release but if you're a thrash enthusiast then please don't come anywhere near it. And if you're an Arnold Schwarzenegger fan? May I recommend Arnocorp's 2005 release The Greatest Band Of All Time for your listening pleasure. It's much better than this nonsense.
If fact this album is so redundant that if Arnolds character from Commando, John Matrix was here listening to it with me, he would laugh at it too.
Written by
Stuart Thursday, December 4, 2008
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