Review Summary: An album that places more emphasis on events that relate to the anus rather than on actual music.
The metal community has seen and heard the likes of many artists who have pushed the envelope and, for better or for worse, have created some of the most disturbing albums to have ever reach the listener's ears.... And while many bands have poked fun at the sexually explicit themes of heavy metal (particularly death metal) there has never really been a release that has eaten the gimmick up and defecated out an audio turd so foul that the album was rendered almost entirely unlistenable. However in 2008 such an album was conjured up and released for the world to hear and shake their heads at in frank disappointment and disgust. The album is entitled
Shi*** Life and is by Japan’s Coprophagia, a very fitting name for an album that causes exactly that (a shi*** life) for the poor listener that has to sit down and listen to the record from start to finish.
While the album is one of the poorest of a pool of similar releases that are available to purchase, it is not at all unique. Many bands have pulled off music that is almost identical in its themes, instrumentation, vocals, and production; although
Shi*** Life is the worst in-terms of song structure, instrumental technique, and production quality. So while the record is certainly not a game changer, it is definitely a name changer. One might as well call it
Shi*** Album instead of
Shi*** Life because of how awful it truly is. There is no other record that is as epitomic of putrid disposable audio waste as this one is. But it is not just one or several individual aspects of Coprophagia’s music that makes the album so horrible, it is every aspect as they are combined to make each track.
The guitar playing on the album is... embarrassing to say the least. Each song off of
Shi*** Life incorporates a tired sounding longitudinal sequence of guitar chugs, that are either accompanied by an over-use of tremolo picking, finger tapping, or pinch harmonics, with every couple of seconds sunken by either a mistake, or unintentional slowing of tempo. The sequenced placement of notes makes it nearly impossible to distinguish individual parts of songs. Segments only become noticeably different because of the fact that some parts are slow and some parts are fast, some parts have ridiculously disjointed riffs, while others sound like they were hazardously improvised. The bass adds absolutely nothing to improve the quality of the compositions. Its presence is audible but purposeless because it follows along with the grotesque guitar riffs and transitions between ineptly configured verses as opposed to keeping time and adding rhythm.
But by far the worst parts of
Shi*** Life lie with the drumming and vocals. The drummer pounds away with limited synchronicity, other than a frustrating lack of consistency in his tempo, just like the guitarist and bassist. However, the drumming is perhaps the most painful to listen to because of its transitions - as it is almost always out of time with the other instruments and constantly makes a painfully audible effort to catch up in the recordings. The vocalist is almost as equally annoying as he mercilessly tears the listener’s ears to pieces with an out-of-pitch falsetto throat growl that sounds proportionate in the amount of pain that one is experiencing as they listen to it as to the amount of pain that the vocalist must feel procuring it. The convergence of all of the aforementioned elements make for a combined hell storm of audio fecal tossing that is likely to cause severe auditory disfigurement and disruption over the course of prolonged sampling.
Thus the verdict rests with the real truth of the matter that
Shi*** Life is an album that should never have been created. It should have remained as wishful thinking for each member of Coprophagia and (or at most) another demo, not a full-length. But if there is one positive thing that can be taken from this albums existence it is that releasing an album before one’s band has become intermediate in tempo, rhythm, transitions, etc. is not a good idea. Actually, it is a horrible idea and
Shi*** Life is the epitome of why it should never be done! There is nothing wrong with talking about human waste in music as long as one’s passion for such a subject is expressed in a listenable manner, like Torsofu**’s album
Erotic Diarrhea Fantasy. At least that album was funny and had some well co-ordinated catchy riffs! This one is just an absolute embarrassment to metal music in general....
