Review Summary: For those who like their angry music tuned to dropped Zb and served with a side of pessimism and a cold glass of hatred.
If you've ever heard
Black Sheep Wall's debut,
I Am God Songs, then you will have a pretty good idea of what to expect going into
Buster. Both albums are obscenely heavy, nihilistic, and pissed-off slabs of ridiculously drop-tuned, breakdown-infested hardcore/sludge fusion, and they both stick to a single formula for their entire duration. I suppose that one could complain about this lack of variety, but I highly doubt that either band even attempted for a moment to inject variety into their music. They both create music not for the sake of creativity, pushing boundaries, or artistry: rather, they crafted these albums for the sole purpose of channeling a single emotion through a single unwavering musical style, and in this regard they are roaring successes, for
Black Sheep Wall's debut is one of the most hopeless, nihilistic, and depressing things I've ever heard, and I'll be damned if I've ever had the opportunity to listen to an angrier and more unhinged album than
Buster.
I mean, holy God in heaven, this thing is really angry, and variation would undoubtedly only weaken its anger. First of all,
Buster has only three speeds: hardcore, slower breakdown, and glacial breakdown. One could also call these, respectively, "I ***ing hate you," "I am prepared to beat you to a pulp right this second, you little ***," and "I am literally curbstomping your stupid ***ing face right now, you God damned asshole". Strangely enough, these three speeds perfectly represent the three "emotions" displayed by
Admiral Angry on this album.
The first speed/emotion, "I ***ing hate you," is a speedier hardcore-esque style slightly reminiscent of a sludgier
Kerouac, and it provides the bulk of and the basic template for most on the songs on
Buster. I'd be amiss if I didn't mention Chris L.'s vocal performance, which is most prominent during these sections: gritty, scratchy, dying-animal shrieks that are just comprehensible enough that you can hear (angry) lyrical gems such as this:
I walk like sex with a stranger
You *** like the day you were born to
Feel pumping behavior
I'll *** you away
I'll *** you away...
If you want to go home
Yes, this album is, indeed,
that angry, and thank God that we are able to decipher some of these lyrical gems, for any man worth his salt knows that there is a statistically significant correlation between the number of times one says "***" in a song and how angry the song is on a scale of one to Irving.
The second speed/emotion, "I am prepared to beat you to a pulp right this second, you little ***", is more akin with the slower and more hateful moments of the music of
Black Sheep Wall or
Meshuggah, combining the overpowering nihilism of the former with the obscene tunings and the sexy grooves of the latter to create something that would make
Buster an unbearably angry album even if the third speed/emotion weren't present. This final gear, "I am literally curbstomping your stupid ***ing face right now, you God damned asshole", is an absolutely beautiful thing. Here, the breakdowns of the second gear are slowed down even further and they groove even harder.
However, this in and of itself isn't enough to make these the angriest ***ing breakdowns ever to exist, as many very questionable deathcore bands slow things down in order to make their music heavy, and it rarely works. No: the factor that pushes this third gear over the top in terms of how much of an aural beating
Buster gives you is how absolutely ***ing ridiculously low the guitars are tuned during these sections. To make a long story short, during these parts
Admiral Angry tune their instruments to dropped Zb and make
Meshuggah's "Nebulous" look like a pussy piece of ***. I swear to God: if you don't believe me, listen to album closer "Illusion of Strength" and wait for the last minute or so. They first go to a dropped Z breakdown of the aforementioned pulp-beating gear and you're like, "holy *** how can I still hear the notes they're playing", then they transition to the curbstomping gear and tune their guitars to double dropped Zbbbb and every note turns to inaudible mud but it doesn't matter because this is
so ***ing angry.
To conclude the most informative and professional review I have ever written, let me give you a summary of
[Admiral Angry's masterpiece of unadulterated "*** you",
Buster. Point A: there is absolutely no variation, because that just isn't angry enough. Point B: the lyrics are brilliant - and very angry - and they use the angriest of words, "***", many times and to good effect. Point C: this album operates on three gears. These gears are "I hate you", "I am going to beat the *** out of you", and "I am curbstomping your face because your face is stupid". Point D: the third gear is the angriest of gears and it makes every other group in existence look like a merry little band of pussies.
***.
