We quite liked this lot before. We don’t seem to anymore…
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[4.00]
Katherine St Asaph: Cool story, bro.
[2]
Zach Lyon: I KNOW FOR A FACT THAT YOU DID NOT.
[2]
Iain Mew: Frankly if they want to be stupid, I wish they would carry through with ridiculous attitude and noise more seriously. As the song finishes, someone faintly asks “Is that alright?” THOSE ARE NOT THE WORDS OF SOMEONE WHO PUNCHES LIONS IN THE THROAT.
[3]
Anthony Easton: If he punches a lion in the throat, can he be eaten by the lion, to prove that this grrarghy aggro is not nearly as effective as he thinks it is?
[6]
Mark Sinker: So the clatter drops out so the mumbly way he deals with a non-screaming vocal is exposed, and he completely swallows the word “punch”. And then you hear him carrying on doing the same when the clatter comes back in. Maybe it’s a metaphor for the frustrations of impotence.
[3]
Martin Skidmore: I approve of half of their style, kind of a slower Napalm Death on the faster parts, where the vocals are appropriately roared and the guitars make a decent stab at violent attack, but they sound weak on the slower sections, partly thanks to thin, weak vocals there. Fortunately this is mostly the louder style, so not bad at all.
[6]
Josh Love: The first half of this one is pretty standard snotnose screamo stuff – the yelped repetition of the song’s title is theoretically funny but all those syllables don’t really fit in the space allotted. But then these kids unearth an absolutely mammoth riff on the track’s back end and all’s forgiven. I’ll take this tasteless 90s pillaging over the more artful swipes of No Age, Male Bonding and Yuck any day of the week.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Lots of shouting (hoarse, of course), and a riff that at the 1:35 mark coils into “Walk This Way” without knowing why. All this needs is a lead singer willing this inchoate rage into cohesion.
[6]
Josh Langhoff: To give this thing more than a one-liner may be overly generous, but that riff that shapes the second half would sound great coming from Soundgarden, and it’s certainly the best thing these yahoos came up with here. Unfortunately, singer Tom Hudson employs both my least favorite timbre of rock scream — the “Blood Brothers down the garbage disposal” sound — and my heretofore unrealized least favorite way of uttering the words “I punched a lion in the throat”. Like, he sounds SMUG about it. Or, more likely, about the fact that he wrote a song called “I Punched a Lion in the Throat”. If these guys were the Test Icicles, they’d have had the courtesy to break up by now.
[2]
Doug Robertson: Capitalism dictates that if there is demand for a product then someone, somewhere will appear to fill this need. The existence of this record ably demonstrates exactly why capitalism is badly, badly wrong.
[3]
Jonathan Bogart: Too undistinguished to be truly terrible, this just makes me think of visiting my local hipster record store. In Arizona, hipsters aren’t quite hip enough to not be frat-metalheads.
[4]