Review Summary: Danza IIII is 56 minutes of mind erasing junz and pointless interludes that stands as not only a new low for core music, but as a new low for music in general.
Danza One One One One: The Alpha and Omega is the latest release from the djent/whatever who cares-core band The Tony Danza Tap Dance Extravaganza, whose name is almost as vapid as their music. The biggest problem with this album is that it's just unpleasant to listen to: it feels heavy and abrasive just for the sake of being heavy and abrasive. There isn't anything sapid enough going on to warrant the abrasive and chaotic nature of the album, and while there are lots of interesting polyrhythms, there aren't any interesting riffs that go over them, leaving the music cold and bare. There's very little melody on
Danza IIII, and at times it feels like the band forgot, or didn't have enough time to record the lead guitar tracks. Listening to
Danza IIII is about as pleasant as banging your head against the wall for 56 minutes, and it's a very strongly contender for worst album of the decade.
Remember when metal albums had riffs? That was pretty cool wasn't it? Well the trend in core music lately seems to involve just play rhythm guitar over polyrhythms and *** the lead guitar. There are very few actual riffs on the album, and 90% of the guitar work in general is on the first five frets of the 8th string. Generally on an album like this, the guitar is the main focus, and that's a bad thing considering how terrible the guitar work is. But sometimes, some great vocals or a tight rhythm section can save an album. This is not the case here. The vocals are fine, I guess - they don't really add anything to the music, they're kind of just there. Except when they're completely horrid like the death metal gargles that come out of nowhere on "The Alpha / The Omega." The drums don't stick out at all, they're merely here to follow the guitar, and the bass is inaudible, but that was to be expected anyway.
Danza IIII has some of the most boring instrumentation and songwriting I've ever heard, and to top it all off, the album is so abrasive, it's unpleasant to listen to, resulting in a painfully hard album to sit through.
The album starts strong enough, I didn't want to utterly kill myself after the first two tracks. The first track is harmless enough, and the second track actually has some interesting riffage. There's this interesting and bizarre crazy high pitched riff that reoccurs in "You Won't" that's actually pretty cool. A riff similar to it pops up later in "Canadian Bacon," but it only sticks around for a few seconds and is followed by a stale breakdown with some random TV or movie samples that becomes quite a trend as the album goes along. The first two tracks didn't bother me that much, but after about five minutes I got completely tired of this band's schtick. Endless mind-numbing junz with little to no medley makes for an exhausting and painful listen that spans an ungodly 56 minutes.
The trend lately in core music is to make the guitar as low as possible, I can't wait till a few years from now when these bands make the guitar so low it's inaudible, that would be a nice change of pace. The guitar tone is so low and muggy that I can't even make out what's going on half the time. The first half-decent melodious guitar riff shows up in "Don't Try This At Home," but it's quickly engulfed by more first five fret palm muted open chord nonsense that totally ruins any momentum the track had going for it. This is the case for any of the songs that have actual riffs (which is only a few) and the rest of the album is either redundant interludes, or mind numbing junz.
Danza IIII is littered with pointless and seemingly random samples and interludes. A lot of the songs break down out of nowhere into ambient sections that don't do anything for the tracks. There's even a track ("Some Things Are Better Left Unsaid") where all the band does is turn the killswitch off and on for five minutes and it leaves me scratching my head. It's often hard to tell whether a new song has started, or if an interlude has ended but it's still the same song. This just goes to show how ineffective the interludes are when I can't even make out where I am in the song. The album even ends with an interlude, as if to show how little the band is capable of writing actual songs, instead having to fall back on these ambient sections.
The track "Paul Bunyan And The Blue Ox" brings the album to a new low, where over half the track is just one or two staccato open chords sections that seem to gone on forever. The song structure used in the seven and a half minute track seems to have been composed at random, Going in and out of breakdowns and interludes, and the fact that it's instrumental doesn't help either. I had originally written the vocals off as being pointless until an instrumental track like this showed up, and it become apparent that the instruments cannot stand on their own at all. Speaking of hilariously bad tracks there's "Hold The Line." I'm honestly not sure if the track "Hold The Line "is a joke or not, it starts off with the singer dedicating the track to the troops, and there are a couple Obama speech samples in the middle, and I can't help but laugh at how ridiculous it is for a band with such a banal sound to try to say something political. This is especially laughable considering you can't understand the lyrics anyway. When this band is at their best they're a middle of the pack core band, but when they're at their worst on tracks like "Paul Bunyan" and "Hold The Line" they're on a whole other level of suck.
It's customary for an album this chaotic and abrasive to be in the 20-30 minute range to spare the listener's ears, but no, Tony Danza feel they need to berate their listeners with this garbage for 56 ***ing minutes. The fact that all the songs sound the same doesn't help either; and when
Danza IIII isn't chaotic, it's just boring. Tracks like "Death Eater" and "The Crossfire" consist of nothing but slow, droning open chords, I think the band was going for an atmospheric sound here, but all it does is bore me to tears.
This album probably wouldn't be so bad if it were 20 minutes long, but the 56 minutes of monotonous mediocrity is inexcusable. The album is dense, chaotic, heavy, and abrasive, but there's no substance. What's the point of crafting an interesting polyrhythms if you aren't going to put any good riffs over it? If you want to bang your head for almost an hour to mind numbing and boring core music then I guess this album is for you, but I personally look for something a little more in my metal record.
