This is Monsoon Cobra, and I'm about to be giving you a speculation money shot all in your face and hair!
*clip of me giving a thoughtful interview to Osama bin Laden*
Hello, everybody, and welcome again to The Speculation Center, where I, Monsoon Cobra, give you my best guess about what is going to happen. Today's Speculation Center comes courtesy of an email that one Patrick Lukens of Cut Your Teeth sent me just hours ago, right before I started sipping whiskey and watching Breaking Bad. Since I've watched my daily allowance of Breaking Bad, it's my journalistic duty to you, the two people who read this stupid blog, to let you know that HOLY SHIT CUT YOUR TEETH IS RELEASING NEW MUSIC THIS YEAR.
The newest cuts from my massive homebros and original party worms Cut Your Teeth will drop on December 30, 2011. Last possible minute? You bet your ugly girlfriend it is! I wish that they had decided on a more apropos release date, since I already wrote the shit out of my 2011 best of the year list, but c'est la vie, to quote that Protest the Hero song that I like.
Pictured: Sam Katz and some bitches, doing Party Worm stuff.
So what should we expect from a new Cut Your Teeth release?
First of all, as I established in my first CYT review, the band solves mysteries, and their drummer is an anthropomorphic shark with a shitty sense of humor. So this release will bring a lot of amusement park owners to justice, as well as bringing the Fucking Party Jams. Second, Cut Your Teeth will begin to dabble in ambient soundscapes, forsaking anthemic jams like "Drink Beers" and "Stallion" in favor of something more layered and gay. Hipsterism being so in vogue as it is, these are qualified as the new Fucking Party Jams. Since Patrick Lukens is such a big shot in Asia due to his bizarre interest in Asian pop music, (I assume) he wrote a ballad for his Japanese body pillow/wife, Sachiko, and bassist Hartley Lewis insisted that there was a dubstep song produced by Skrillex on the album (I imagine). Needless to say, it's sure to please anybody who thinks that some stuff is cool while other stuff is not cool.
Me? Well, I've heard some of the new stuff, and I can tell you that it not only rocks and is ambient and gay, but that Cut Your Teeth will be our unequivocal masters of rocking the fuck out until the Mayan calendar destroys us later next year. I'm just happy that CYT are releasing new material before I'm sent to Xibalba, where I will pay for all of the dick jokes and making fun in the Mayans that I've done.
But I'm not sorry.
Visit them here and see how much I've jocked them. Or visit them here to listen to or download their music for FREE, without having to be a dirty criminal interwebbist for it.
The end of the year is upon us, and I say it's about fucking time. I've been battling what turns out to be the longest running minor head cold in human history, and I've been totally flaking on everything I do, from writing this pointless blog of mine to playing my guitar pointlessly to obsessing over Batman: Arkham City (which is far and away the best game of the year, and no, I haven't played Skyrim). Indeed, my high-grade obsessive nature has been so co-opted by my lingering disease that it's turned me in to an apathetic turd man, lazing around on the couch, watching ancient episodes of Law and Order and getting pumped on Detective Lenny Briscoe's myriad wisecracks.
Pictured: Briscoe and Green being badass motherfuckers, in their standard fashion.
Additionally, all the piss and pomp has been drained from me by a relatively demanding work schedule and the fact that I'm so intimately involved in the process of moving our entire operation from our current location to a newer, bigger, more fantastic warehouse. As such, I've been expending all of my creative efforts stacking inventory for the movers and concocting ever more elaborate reasons to not murder some of my coworkers. It's a tough process that demands a great deal of my energy, so my idiot blog has suffered. But since there are roughly two people who ever visit this site anymore, I think I should apologize to you by name: sorry, Dad and Ed.
My relative lack of posting and shortness of dick jokes hasn't stopped me from listening to lots and lots of music this year, though, and just like the rest of the Interhole masses, I've constructed a list of my top albums of the year, and have put them into an order that I felt made some sense. It's pretty standard stuff, actually, if you've ever seen a list. Now we all know that all of the Interbung music critics are going to be saying stuff like "2011 was a terrible year for metal" and "There wasn't that much good stuff happening this year" and a bunch of other stuff that translates to "I am a fucking douche bag." But I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this year has been fantastic for metal at large, and for the first time in years, I didn't have a clear cut favorite albums list, and was therefore forced to make tough, hard-reasoned, and--in the end--arbitrary decisions about what I would include on this giant list.
See what I'm talking about with the "lack of creative juices" thing?
So without further ado, here are the albums that I think were the best this year:
MONSOON COBRA'S TOP RATED SUPER LOCK PICK OF THE YEAR DELUXE
In what should come as no surprise to anybody who has ever read anything I wrote regarding my fanatical enthusiasm for Trap Them, their latest album won my Top Rated Super Lock Pick of the Year Deluxe award, given to the finest, crustiest, and most crushing album of the year. If you haven't experienced this album yet, you are wrong and should have any children or animals in your home taken away by authorities and euthanized. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is.
Exhumed almost usurped the top slot from Trap Them this year with their crushing and crusty brand of death metal. Indeed, they inhabit the very essence of death metal, from the artwork to the subject matter ("Your Funeral, My Feast," and "I Rot Within" pop into my mind). Exhumed may indeed be the ultimate death metal band; they tickle my D-boner in a way that no other band who plays diminished key guitar solos has done in years, and have subsequently reinvigorated my desire to eat entrails.
Anaal Nathrakh are the embodiment of aural intensity. They're the sound of your horrible, violent death distilled into monolithic guitar tones and frantic, burning-witch shrieks. I didn't know if they'd be able to follow up 2009's In the Constellation of the Black Widow (which was my Top Rated Super Lock Pick of the Year Deluxe of that year), but I closed my eyes and wished upon a shining star, and my wish came true! Oh, the glory of it! Anaal Nathrakh is not recommended if you are pregnant, have a heart condition, or are a pussy. Please talk to your doctor before listening to Anaal Nathrakh.
I think it's safe to say that I've not been blown away by a black metal band so thoroughly in years, or maybe ever. Blut Aus Nord play black metal that crawls with insects, all clawing horribly at their disgusting meat sack with their terrible pincers and things. The year's most challenging--and rewarding--listen lies in wait in the nightmare that is 777 Sect(s).
How good can an album that is less than 15 minutes long really be, am I right? Turns out, the answer is "really fucking good." A nonstop orgy of frantic guitar riffing, whirling blastbeats and pterodactyl vocals, Orphan is a grind triumph of the highest order.
Revocation burst on to the scene a few years ago and showed everybody that awesome shredding is still cool. A ridiculous mix of Children of Bodom style guitar wizardry and Dream Theater-esque progressive leanings ensure that lame shred nerds like me have plenty to think about while we jack off and change guitar strings.
Do you like crushing guitar tones? Do you like pummeling tornadoes of blast beats? Do you like when things FUCKING ROCK? It turns out, you're a huge Rotten Sound fan. Cursed sounds like the soundtrack to being mauled by a particularly angry bear, except it won't leave you alone when you play dead. Also, don't climb a tree; Rotten Sound can climb faster than they can grind.
The technical death metal album of the year comes under the sage wizardry of Abysmal Dawn, who know how to level buildings with their awesome sound just as effectively as the worm monster that graces the cover of Leveling. Whether it's a cascade of note-diarrhea or the lumbering crush of "Perpetual Dormancy," Abysmal Dawn show that it's actually possible to write cohesive songs as a technical death metal band. And isn't that an achievement in and of itself?
Don't let the boring album art fool you; Ulcerate have carved themselves a unique sound from a monolithic hunk of Neurosis granite using a Gorguts chisel. The Destroyers of All is an exhilarating listen, full of dissonant skronk, Earth-shattering heaviness and that certain something that my wife once described as "I can't listen to this. Turn it off."
I've spoken at length with people who are longtime fans of Today is the Day, and it turns out that they don't like this album very much. Me? I think it's just dandy. Forsaking the noisy grind standards of their back catalog, TItD have created something special that appeals to those of us who don't think that playing the guitar and allowing it to feed back endlessly are the same thing. Excelsior!
HONORABLE MENTIONS
Weekend Nachos--Worthless
The Atlas Moth--An Ache for the Distance
Lock Up--Necropolis Transparent
Protest the Hero--Scurrilous
Dream Theater--A Dramatic Turn of Events
Victims--A Dissident
DISAPPOINTMENT OF THE YEAR
Mastodon--The Hunter
DEMOS OF THE YEAR
1) Auroboros--Demo
2) Black Monolith--Demo EP
3) God Harvest--God Harvest Demo 2011
Now, in accordance with the agreement I made with myself for finally finishing this super long post, I'm going to drink my expensive whisky I bought on Friday and play Mass Effect. Later this week I'll be finishing my year end bullshit, if I decide to, which I probably won't.
After a long blackout, Mouthful of Acid is back up and running. I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving, except the non-Americans, who might not even know that we celebrate the generosity of the native Americans that the pilgrims took advantage of shortly before slaughtering them for land and precious, precious gold. It's a time of the year that is exemplary of all of the major American values, including eating, watching football, getting drunk, and (the next day, at least) shopping. Mine was great, and as a red blooded American dynamo, I was the picture of what it is to be an American for the entire long weekend.
Since I had Thursday and Friday off, I did nothing but eat, drink heavily, drive my mom's golf cart around, and regret doing all of those things after the blank periods where I would fall asleep on the couch and remain unconscious for nine hours or so.
And I also drove in a parade. Or rather, through a parade. What a weekend!
With the end of Thanksgiving, the end of the year is upon us; Christmas cheer is running high and I'm actively avoiding grocery stores and shopping outlets as much as I possibly can. It's not the throngs of people attacking each other with pepper spray for a copy of Modern Warfare 3 (which they could have gotten if they just preordered it like a normal human being). It's not the gaggles of squawking psychopaths out to make their family's Christmas as good as possible by purchasing them things because they don't ever do things for anybody else any other time of the year. They aren't the problem.
No, it's the Christmas music.
There's nothing that I hate more than Christmas music; it's really a canon of music that only has about 15 real entries, and none of them are actually any good. It's just the season that they're associated with. The only thing that I can honestly say I enjoy as little as Christmas music is breaking my bones, which I've done plenty of in my time (ask my mom if you don't believe me), and thankfully I haven't broken as many bones as I've listened to Christmas songs. So I've resolved to take a page from my uncle's book this year and avoid Christmas stuff until the last possible moment, take care of everything I need to do in a frenzied scramble, and show up to our family Christmas gathering smelling like marijuana to give my wife the gift that I just bought for her at the 7-11.
It seems to have worked for him so far, so I assume that it will be perfect for me.
The other thing that December brings us is the Blogmosphere's endless stream of Top [Number] [Musical Thing] of [Year] lists. Not to be outdone, and especially since I've finally fully regained consciousness, I will be slowly releasing my Top Whatever Lists over the course of however long it takes for me to get bored of doing that. So in that spirit, here are what I have decided to be the best fucking songs of whatever year this is.
1) All Pigs Must Die--"Sacrosanct"
This song has everything that you would ever need for anything, including D-beats, crunchy riffs, and Ben Koller. This song dominated my playlists this year, and I would listen to it so much that the guy I work with who only listens to Atmosphere would tell me to expand my musical palette a little, for God's sake.
He's so high and mighty since he started listening to Weezer also sometimes.
2) Opeth--"Slither"
Opeth are the only band who could achieve what they did with Heritage; just think if In Flames did an all acoustic band, or if Cannibal Corpse suddenly decided that they were going to make an entire album that sounds like Frank Zappa. That shit wouldn't work, but Opeth can do it. And it doesn't just come out okay, either. This isn't like when I cook dinner for my wife, and there's a bunch of disasters and a horrible mess, but the food is technically edible; it's more like if I made dinner and it turns out, whoops, I'm like Emeril, or that fat lady that everybody loves these days. You know the one. The crown jewel in Opeth's treasure trove of music is "Slither," a song which Mikael Akerfeldt himself declared to be "a ripoff of Rainbow."
3) Abysmal Dawn--"Perpetual Dormancy"
You know what I like? Heavy metal. You know what I really like? CRUSHING DEATH METAL. Abysmal Dawn wrote what was probably my favorite tech death record ever with this year's Leveling the Plane of Existance, and the first time I heard this bone-crushing riff, I FREAKED THE FUCK OUT. This song has everything you need in a death metal song, including the sick Morbid Angel-style "pulverizing slow riff." I'm not allowed to listen to this in the car anymore, because my wife doesn't like the intensity, and also because I got distracted by how awesome the song was and ran over my neighbor's dog. Whoops.
4) Today is the Day--"The Devil's Blood"
I've never been in to Today is the Day until just lately; I've explored their back catalog and decided that, as I've said before, I'm not a noise guy. But their new material is decidedly less noisy and more powerful, and this song gets my fists pumping every time. I especially like to think of "Stone Cold" Steve Austin giving people the Stunner when I listen to this song, because I don't do research, but I do know that Steve Austin is the name of the main man in Today is the Day, and I therefore assume they're the same people. Which makes me frightened of Today is the Day.
5) Trap Them--"Damage Prose"
I'm a Trap Them superfan, and this song is so crusty and awesome that I'm all giddy thinking about it right now. I don't have much to say other than that, and that I'll bet the track everyone else lists from Darker Handcraft (if they do a song-related thing like me, that is) would be "The Facts," which rocks, but not as much as this. Oh, and I <3 Chris Maggio.
6) Protest the Hero--"C'est La Vie"
I love busy, wanky guitars. I love Rody Walker's weird singing voice. I love Protest the Hero, and this song is a great example of a song that is as legitimately catchy as it is structurally labyrinthine. And the breakdown at about 2:05 always gets my heart pumping, and not just because the song is full of hamfisted references to suicide. When Protest the Hero fly, they soar high, and there's no "too close to the sun" for them. Here's the official video for the song, which I've never watched before. Enjoy.
7) Exhumed--"Distorted and Twisted to Form"
Exhumed are a symbol of everything I stand for, including crusty death metal, D-beat slams, and pictures of zombies eating guts. This song is the reason that I'm glad they came back from their extended hiatus and made an album. If you had asked me if it was a good idea, I would have told you "No, if they came back and made an album, it would probably suck." Well, Exhumed, you made me eat those words, made me eat them like they were made of guts and I was a cool zombie doing cool zombie stuff.
8) Dream Theater--"Lost Not Forgotten"
Speaking of wanky prog, it's Dream Theater! This song not only has the best guitar solo ever, but that wank at the beginning? Perfect. Fuck you, I love Dream Theater. But you should probably ignore the lyrics.
9) Anaal Nathrakh--"Who Thinks of the Executioner"
Holy fucking balls, the intensity that Anaal Nathrakh bring to the table is almost too much. It's like the aural equivalent of that show Breaking Bad, where you can't imagine such intensity being kept up for long, but then it FUCKING IS. The only downside to Anaal Nathrakh is that there's no Bryan Cranston, and I love Bryan Cranston.
10) Rotten Sound--"Hollow"
If there's one thing I can't get enough of these days, it's grind. Sweet, sweet grind, and I think Rotten Sound is my latest grind obsession. They do the D-beat that gets my D-boner to stand at attention, then they punish you with slow, crushing riffing before bringing the crust back. And I love the crust, except the kind that's on my underwear, because it's hard to clean off and it eats RIGHT THROUGH THE RUBBER GLOVES OH GOD NOOOOOOO!
So there's my list of my favorite songs of this year. Since I'm almost certain that nobody reads this crap anymore, I'm afraid to ask, but I will anyway: Did I miss anything? If you tell me in the comments, I'll be...surprised.
This is Monsoon Cobra reporting from The Motherfucking Speculation Center. It's time to speculate!
*Montage of me turning around dramatically*
In the spirit of depriving me of things that I would or do really like, Lock Up has announced a North American headlining tour with Goatwhore and Strong Intention as support. For those of you who aren't familiar with Lock Up, it's a super group consisting of Tomas Lindberg (At the Gates, Disfear), Shane Embury (Napalm Death, Venomous Concept), Nick Barker (ex-Dimmu Borgir and several other embarrassing projects), and Anton Reisenegger (whose name I can spell pretty well because I lived under the reign of the Governator for years. He signed my college diploma!). To further inform you if you don't already know, Lock Up kind of fucking rule, and with so many heavies playing all in one band, you'd be remiss if you didn't go check this out, unless you live in Texas, in which case you have a viable excuse for not going.
The Speculation Center news computer has compiled a simulation of what I assume will be going on behind the scenes on the Lock Up tour. Here is a brief transcript:
Tomas Lindberg: "America sure is cool. I wish I didn't live in Sweden or whatever, where I have free health care and a longer life expectancy. I'd rather be subsidizing the huge bonuses for CEO's like my superior American masters."
Shane Embury: "At least while we're here we don't have to be subjected to Monsoon Cobra's awesome power. I'm frightened of his raw energy and devastating good looks, which is why we aren't going to go anywhere that he can personally attend a show. I've seen to that!"
[Everybody laughs a villainous laugh while simultaneously looking over their shoulders to make sure I don't come popping out of the shadows like a Fucking Boss, because I do that sometimes]
Anton Reisenegger: "If there's one thing that I like, it's depriving Monsoon Cobra of the opportunity to enjoy our music live, even though if we ever met we'd immediately be best friends."
Nick Barker: "Yeah, just like when I was in Cradle of Filth. Right?"
[Tomas Lindbergs sighs loudly in response]
[End communication]
For those of you who aren't being persecuted by the awesome band Lock Up, tour dates are below. Go check them out and tell them that I forgive them, but I've also got my eye on them.
Lock Up w/ Goatwhore and Strong Intention…
2/08 – Buffalo, NY @ Club Infinity
2/09 – Albany, NY @ Bogies
2/10 – Boston, MA @ Club Lido
2/11 – Montreal, QC @ Katacombes
2/12 – Tortonto, ON @ Wreck Room
2/13 – Chicago, IL @ Reggie’s
2/14 – Columbus, OH @ Alrosa Villa
2/15 – Baltimore, MD @ Sonar
2/16 – Brooklyn, NY @ Europa
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.
Welcome to another edition of The Speculation Center, where I, the world's best pundit and most foremost authority on Batman: Arkham City, bring you my best guess about what is probably going to happen relating to news about bands that I like. This is Monsoon Cobra reporting from The Speculation Center War Room.
*Dramatic music*
It seems that Canadian death metal powerhouse Kataklysm recently captured the GAMIQ (from the Quebec Indie Music Awards) for "Metal/Hardcore Album of the Year" with their 2011 release Heaven's Venom. Kudos are in order! I've listened to this album a bunch of times this year, and I can say that I think there are more deserving bands, but I can also say that they probably aren't Canadian, which I assume is a prerequisite to winning a GAMIQ. The consensus here at The Speculation Center is that Kataklysm's new responsibility to their fans is to immediately let this go to their heads, get a Mercedes Benz tour bus with a Jacuzzi on the roof, and show up to gigs and then immediately cancel them to go parasailing with movie stars. Because they're award winners, they will accuse the President (it doesn't matter which) of not caring about black people, then start a line of upscale casual clothing. The subsequent lawsuit for misuse of the Spongebob Squarepants character will only make them more powerful, until they inevitably burn out and lose their lives while on a drug-fueled trip to their Malaysian sweatshop.
There will be tiny sewing machines everywhere, and the world will mourn. So congratulations are in order to Kataklysm!
On an unrelated note, Sepultura has found a new drummer, further taunting longtime fans who hope for the Cavalera brothers to reunite and do something Sepultura related again, thereby giving us all a reason to hope. Instead of doing that, Sepultura have announced that drums will be handled by Brazilian wonderboy Eloy Casagrande, who won the Modern Drummer Undiscovered Drummer contest in 2006. Check out this tasty drum solo here if you want to know if he's any good.
We here at The Speculation Center understand that the common opinion of this bold move is that Sepultura are robbing the cradle for a drummer, and have done a pretty damn good job of finding one. The Speculation Center prefers to think that Casagrande is robbing the grave for a career, and has made a questionable decision in doing so.
This has been The Speculation Center, Monsoon Cobra reporting.
If you've been reading this blog for very long (and you probably haven't, because nobody ever reads this blog), you might remember a certain post where I basically begged anybody who might happen upon my blog to give me press credentials so that I can get free swag from record labels. The good news is that somebody noticed, and recently I began getting press releases sent to me. The bad news is that I still don't have any pre-release album streams or Black Dahlia Murder shotglasses or anything sweet sent to me. Which is fine; I like to be in the loop as much as I can without having to every actually speak to anybody.
I like the faceless quality that the Interhole gives me. It allows me to call Periphery "the worst band in the fucking world" without catching really any flak from it, no matter how hard I mean it (and I really, really mean it, too).
With my newfound press credentials from at least one P.R. company, I've finally got all the firepower I need to deliver you the most vital breaking news about bands that I care about whenever I feel like doing it. Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to The Speculation Center!
*Dramatic music paired with montage of me turning to the camera dramatically*
Welcome to The Speculation Center, your one stop shop for all of the semi-breaking news about bands that I'm interested in when I don't have anything better to do, soft news puff pieces, and pictures of cute cats doing silly things. This is Monsoon Cobra reporting.
That's just crazy!
Today's edition of The Speculation Center focuses on Psycroptic, the down-under tech death troop, and their newest album, The Inherited Repression, set to release on February 7th in North America, and probably a different date for other nations that I don't live in. Oh, wait, February 10th in Europe. The track listing has just been released, and it looks like this:
1. Carriers of the Plague
2. Forward to Submission
3. Euphorinasia
4. The Throne of Kings
5. Unmasking the Traitors
6. Become the Cult
7. From Scribe to Ashes
8. Deprivation
9. The Sleepers Have Awoken
Now, I'm no big city lawyer, but I do know a thing or two about Psycroptic, and probably two other things about technical death metal, which is Psycroptic's bread and butter. And here at The Speculation Center, my job that I arbitrarily gave myself is to speculate about things, so you'd better saddle up, because I'm about to jump dick first into some talking about the probable qualities of an album that I've never listened to.
First, the title The Inherited Repression is clearly a critique on Barack Obama's attempts to end the Bush-era upper class tax cuts, and thereby create the end of Western Civilization as we know it. If the tax cuts were allowed to end, rich people in the United States would have slightly less money to spend on Formula One racecars and fancy cheeses, thereby making it harder for you to get a job. Now I'm not saying that Obama is a reptilian alien, but he IS trying to destroy America, and his many lizardlike features make it hard to believe that he doesn't fly a Nazi flying saucer to his subterranean base underneath Antarctica. And if you're accusing him of being a shapeshifter, well, I have to call bull on that, because everybody knows that reptoids wear holographic camouflage. I assume that this album is about the repression that the richest among us will inherit if we allow the Barack Obama to destroy America by inconveniencing the rich.
The tracks "Become the Cult" and "Euphorinasia" are going to be real rump shakers, and will go over big at the hottest dance clubs, and "Forward to Submission" is the song most likely to be featured on the next edition of Kidz Bop. Since this is Psycroptic's fifth studio album, I assume that means that they'll finally be getting back to their roots and will be incorporating the bagpipe and hurdy-gurdy heavy elements that I assume dominated their sound before they got signed.
It's going to be quite a showing from the down under wonderboys in Psycroptic, all right! Congratulations, Psycroptic, you just got speculated all over!
