Review Summary: iwrestledabearonce's latest acid trip had better come with a warning label from the surgeon general, because this stuff is horrible for you. You can't call them unoriginal, that's for sure.
iwrestledabearonce is a band that looks nonsensical on paper and proves to make even less sense when you listen to them. Their debut,
It's All Happening, took inspiration from several different genres like techno and orchestral-classical and combined it with a hardcore/heavy metal feel. This style has been continued with their latest release
Ruining it for Everybody, which comes complete with artwork akin to something from
The Wildhearts and song titles straight out of a family-friendly
GWAR album (I know it sounds impossible, but just look at the tracklist). Make no mistake - this band takes their job as a big fat joke and intends to broadcast that to the world with their sophomore album.
While the techno influences are more expanded and fleshed out on this record, the band also makes more use of excessively-annoying screaming that's so much louder than anything else on the album. From the start, this record is just plain irritating to listen to, and Cameron's cleans don't make it much better - they seem to just relieve us of the ridiculous filtered screaming and give us the false hope of it being over before it starts back up again and punches us square in the jaw. Irritating or misleading vocals aside, the instrumental job here is a very interesting mix. A song I actually enjoyed listening to was the fourth track, "This Head Music Makes My Eyes Rain", which is surprisingly soothing and paints a pretty vivid picture in my head. Cameron's voice can be appreciated here much better than in the other tracks, and the slow feel lends well to the much faster "It is "Bro", Isn't it?", which can only be described as a strange parody of breakdown-ridden metalcore, as most of it is either a breakdown or a really fast-paced passage.
Say what you will about the instrumental inspiration, but if you say it's "repetitive" or "not dynamic enough", I'll have to laugh in your face. In all my time listening to metal, there has yet to be any set of guitars and drums asynchronous and haphazard enough to match the caliber of craziness created by this band. I was literally in awe with the ridiculousness of what I was hearing half the time (the other half was spent cringing from the screamed vocals), and although sometimes I was impressed, most of the time I was trying to ease my headache away by muting the sheer oddity of it all. What the hell is this, drug metal? Between the filters and effects added to the music and the actual music itself, I can't for the life of me find a middle ground between creative and flat-out insane. So many of these songs are different from each other that you could just swap them out for songs off their debut and I probably wouldn't notice the difference if I went back for another listen.
This record is all over the place, much like their debut. If you enjoyed their hectic and disorganised style, you might enjoy this record, but be warned; while you might have been refreshed by
It's All Happening due to its uncanny nature,
Ruining it for Everybody is much more haphazard and just a generally unenjoyable mess. Maybe I just don't have an ear for this "style" of music, but between the screaming that's either boring or irritating and the instruments that borrow from twelve hundred different genres, this record is way too hard to pin down, and listening to it gave me a headache. Apologies if I'm just not well-adjusted to the band enough, but I sure as *** can't take anymore of iwrestledabearonce. They're just as anti-brain cell as the fumes they must have been inhaling when they were writing this music. Bleh.
Recommended Tracks:
4.) "This Head Music Makes My Eyes Rain"
9.) "Karate Nipples"
