With the end of the year approaching, many bloggers such as myself are frantically scrambling to put together our year end lists that nobody will put any stock in whatsoever. It's actually a lot of fun to do, because I get my friends on the phone and we gossip and giggle and talk about the most crushing releases of the year in our opinions. We're all like "Have you heard the new Atlas Moth album? It's soooo good, OMGz, it's like A Glorified Piece of Blue Sky but wayyyyy better!" And then we all squeal and have a pillow fight and have Van Damned's mom order us a pizza.
And then with the experimentation. But I won't get into that now.
On my quest to find the best and crunchiest music of the year, I have obviously been checking all the nooks and crannies to find compelling material. Unsurprisingly, there's very little going on under my couch, but I did find the other XBox controller, which led to a five hour Batman: Arkham City play-a-thon, so needless to say, I've been more distracted with busting cartoon dudes as the Caped Crusader (or Nightwing, who is badass on the combat maps) than with listening to new material. Thankfully, things weren't always this way, and I was on the ball for long enough earlier this year to immediately start listening to All Pigs Must Die's most recent album, God Is War.
One thing I respect about All Pigs Must Die is their adherence to extremity; you don't see a lot of "Jesus' head skewered on an inverted cross" pictures outside of the death/black metal sphere, and I wouldn't have expected to see it as the cover of a crust/grind album, but here we are. In the true spirit of the hyper provocative (Pig Destroyer et al.), All Pigs Must Die have chosen not only a name that my mother wholly disapproves of (and she knows that I listen to Cattle Decapitation and 3 Inches of Blood), but they've managed to comingle that name with an album cover that my wife will never let me bring into our home.
She has a thing for anti-religious imagery that I have agreed to respect so that we can live together in harmony, and as if the inverted cross wasn't enough, they had to go using it as a pike for Jesus' head, making sure that if I ever bought this album (which I would really like to) and my wife found it, it would be unceremoniously thrown away, and then I would have to explain to her why I've gone backsies on our metal-related treaty. In this scenario, she is Ricky Ricardo, and I'm Lucy, and I've got some 'splaining to do.
Waaaahhhhhh!
But damn it, I still respect their choice to be as over-the-top as possible, because that's what metal is all about, and the jarring image on the cover of the album is surprisingly highly indicative of the music that lies beneath. God Is War is a crushing powerhouse of an album that starts off with a band and fires on all cylinders for the duration. Dynamics take the form of "faster or slower" and there's no pitiful excuses for clean singing, which is just the way I likes it. Sweet, pure, glorious fury fly from the speakers like that slime from Ghostbusters II, except you can't use it to make the Statue of Liberty walk around with a Nintendo joystick. And don't think I haven't tried, because I've been trying to take the Statue of Liberty on a joyride since I was five.
And that's why I'm not allowed on Ellis Island anymore.
Ghostbusters-related digressions aside, APMD have crafted one of the crustiest and most crushing albums this year. I can't get enough of it, and I'm hoping that they'll come out with a version of the album for pussy-whipped douches like me, with all-new cover art that won't force me to sleep on the couch. I was thinking maybe a sleeve for the case that makes it look like a brown paper sack is taped around it? Hit me up, APMD, because I'm kind of an idea man, and I want this forbidden tome very much.
And because I'm in such a generous mood, you should check this out, because it's possibly my favorite 3:17 of music that has come out this year.
Holy balls!
On a semi-related note, I'd like to write Ben Koller a love song called "Play Those Drums (Were Those Bangs You Had When I Saw You At SXSW?)," which will be about me and Ben Koller having a bromance. I've got a version of it all mocked up right now, and it's about 19 minutes long, and that's before the extended space jam guitar solo I have planned. So hit me up, Ben, because I need a drummer to play this shit live.
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