¡Forward, Russia!
Life Processes
Cooking Vinyl/Mute Records
3/10
Oh. My. God. This is awful. Which is a bummer, because the CD cover art’s rad, the album’s packaged well, but, jeeez. This sucks. I can’t even deal with it. One point for the cover art. But, I really can’t stand to think that this guy’s voice is one that could “grow on me.” I don’t know if he is going for the spazzy stylings of At The Drive In/Mars Volta, but it just sounds like he’s both terrified and someone’s standing on his nuts. His voice cracks worse than a 13 year old yours truly started getting hair in really weird places.
While the drums sound really weird at times, the drumming’s top notch, which gives this album one of two points, the other comes from the lead guitarist, who has some sweet meedley meedley guitar parts. It’s all like, meedley meedley meedley meeeeee! Noice. They have these great cinematic arrangements that sound epic as fuck…but this asshat keeps squeeling over them. Knock it off, fucktard, you’re ruining the tunes. Worst offense: Don’t Reinvent What You Don’t Understand, at the end of each line he goes into this horrible falsetto (AKA: girl voice) for a syllable. It makes my ears cry. Stop it.
-Jonathan “The Emperor” Yost