Mumakil--Behold the Failure

So tomorrow I have to move.  Thankfully I'm not moving very far; just like my last move, I'm packing up my entire life in stolen boxes, shoving everything into a U-Haul trailer, and taking it roughly two miles down the road.  It's all the fun of having the bottoms of your feet scraped with cheese graters, with the added fun of having stacks of boxes all over the apartment.  And those boxes are masterfully stealthy; the only time I realize they're there is when I get up in the middle of the night to pee and walk face first into them.  My wife keeps telling me that leading with my face in the dark isn't a good idea, but I think my hands are more valuable.

So with my apartment in a state of perfect disarray for the last several weeks, I've had to rely on my creative wiles to keep myself entertained while all of my crap is packed up.  And by that, I mean I've been sitting on the couch replaying Dead Space 2 for the fourth time and watching episode after episode of Mad Men on Netflix.  Turns out my "creatively entertaining myself" looks strikingly similar to the regular way I entertain myself, except when I get up to get another beer I have way more stuff to stub my toe on.  And with all my dishware packed up, I've been forced to eat with plastic silverware, all of which is too tiny to effectively use.

I think I just realized that I have high-class, white people problems.

But it still is mildly inconvenient, and since I'm going to have to take apart my entertainment center tonight, I'm going to have to endure several hours where I haven't shut off my brain in favor of watching complex, fictional characters say confounding things to each other, with archaic 60's slang terms peppered in for flavor.

I have no idea what they're talking about, but I'd like to be able to drink and smoke cigarettes at work.

Also, and SPOILER ALERT for those of you who aren't into Mad Men, but Don Draper always gets the pussy.

I think that, having examined my behavior as an amazing human turd, the phrase "behold the failure" fits quite adeptly to my life (and likely to most of your lives, too).  I am, after all, a shining monument to the peak of the technological age, and would be the perfect spokesman for the failure of all humanity in these amazing times.  I picture it as a poster, a blown up picture of me on a Saturday morning, laying on the couch with a cup of coffee.  Since it's Saturday, I'd be wearing a stained wife beater and my boxer briefs with the holes in the crotch, exposing my balls to the television.  And what you can't see is that I'm watching something odd, like Hey Arnold or Medium.

What?  I can't imagine that you do a lot better on a Saturday morning.

Alternate image: I'm in a cage like a circus bear, eating a frozen burrito.  There is a large crowd gathered around my cage to watch a guy tame me and put his head in my mouth.

Luckily, other than just being an amazingly appropriate tagline for my life, Behold the Failure is also a superb grindcore album by Mumakil, whose name is so odd that I refuse to ever actually say it to anybody.  It's like Agalloch, where everybody has concocted their own cockamamie pronunciation for it, and no two are the same.  This is another instance where I'm glad that I rocked Last.fm for as long as I did, because for all of the stinkers that it lobbed at me (I'm looking at you, Supermachiner), and for all the inconsistencies (it turns out that Gaza only has one actual Gaza song on Last.fm and it's called "Sluts Fuck Better."  The rest of the songs are new-agey soundscapes with an oddly aggro name for the band who creates them), Last.fm has given me several new bands to obsess over.  And on the pile with Victims and Narrows, there lies Mumakil.

Behold the Failure is a powerhouse thrillride of a grindcore album, and it has all of my favorite elements of metal, including a reasonably modern sounding production (not overly loud or obnoxious, like a Touche Amore album, but clean), great technical riffing that appeals to fretwatchers like myself and the common grind nerd alike, and that punishing, relentless sound that suits grind so well (other examples include Rotten Sound and Leng T'che).  Songs like "Parasites" and "Get Wasted of Die" showcase what pummeling, catchy songwriting and explosive energy sound like properly utilized.  And that's on top of the confusing and ham-handed song titles.

Luckily for Mumakil, the music more than makes up for songs called "Pisskeeper" and "Useless Fucks," both of which would make me roll my eyes in exasperation had I not already been beguiled by the fierce grind attack.  And my favorite aspect of the album?  It's fucking relentless.  There are no slow burners gumming up the works here; everything is aural laxative, keeping things somewhere between a full sprint and Wile E. Coyote rocket skates.

You can stream the entire album on the Relapse Records Bandcamp page, and you should do that now, because it's so awesome that it makes my dick ache when I listen to it.  And not ache like when you accidentally slam it in the refrigerator door, but ache like when you see the girl who's so hot that your dick feels like it's going to detach itself and spend the rest of your life following her around like the world's grossest puppy.

Or maybe only I know what that means.  But you should still go listen to the album.