Review Summary: Emoviolence that will make you bleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeed
Allow me to begin with a completely unnecessary questionnaire:
What do you call a garbage man that loves Pavement?
indietrash
What does indietrash call every hardcore band ever?
emoviolence
Who began the entire “movement” of emoviolence, (under the terms that you can call about five bands a movement) coined the phrase, (seriously or jokingly, it doesn’t really matter) and got the wheels spinning in one of the most obscure and joked-about subgenres in modern music?
That would be vocalist/lyricist Chris Bickel, guitarist Paul Swanson, and any group of assorted musicians the two could find. Banned together the group was known as In/Humanity.
So, there’s no doubt that the band isn’t using uninteresting sound clips, chanting terrible phrases (We are the Kids) or d
icking around with unnecessary effects, they are one of the most brutal, intense, emotional bands of all-time. When Bickel screams, you can just about hear his lungs collapsing inside of him. When Swanson plays, you can just about hear blisters forming and popping on his hands. And when the other various accomplices join in, you can just about hear them thinking “What the f
uck did I get myself into?” as they pound on their respective instruments. And while it may all be fun on one level, it doesn’t really amount to anything. And while the band thrashes away, the listener can only wonder “Why?” Is there supposed to be a point to the music? Is this actually trying to put through a message to the listener? The only decipherable screams throughout the whole album were on the track “Teenage Suicide – Do It!” where the lyrics were aptly “Teenage Suicide!!!!! Dooooooooo It!!!!!” The only other lyrics I could track down on the internet were for “Super Plan B” which essentially says the same thing, albeit more eloquently.
“Got a lions share stock in suicide/Got a way out when I gotta get out/Gotta get goin' when the going gets tough/Gotta move and shake things when the waters are rough/S.I.D. is the place to be/Self Inflicted Death makes a super plan B.”
It essentially feels like the band is being hardcore, just for the sake of being hardcore. It feels as though the band never wanted to really
make music, they just wanted to
play music in some seedy basement downtown with twenty other people and beat the *** out of each other all night. So, while that is respectable in its own right, it makes it hard to review such an album. This album wasn’t made to be reviewed, it was made so people who weren’t around where/when In/Humanity was playing, so they could take it, put it in their home stereos, gather twenty of their friends and break *** in their basement all night long.
Unfortunately, I do have to give a rating to this. For the actual album, I can’t really give it much higher than a 2/5. It feels wrong because I know the band never really took themselves too seriously, but if they were going to joke around, they should have at least done it well.
