Review Summary: . . .
It took me a long time to form the words necessary to describe this album and even now I am not sure they will suffice.
Mummy and Daddy is an abomination. A sick, twisted, brilliant abomination.
Hell, when you have an album that scared Bennett the Menace as he made it, you have truly unlocked the forbidden door. There is a level in sound that can be very hard to reach, and in many ways probably shouldn't. Nevertheless, Bennett makes it his mission to unlock the untouched doors of human society, and he came out a different human being. It left me a changed being when I first listened to it too. There was nothing on the market like this, and most likely never will be.
For context, I just want to let you know that I truly consider everything I just wrote before this sentence to be complete and utter bullshit.
No seriously, I tend to not buy in to the odd priority list of "Crimes that are worse than others according to our weird fucked up standard." Fans call this one of Bennett's darkest recordings. Really？ But the ones about the serial killers killing and mutilating dozens of victims are tame by comparison？Give me a fucking break. This is a good album though, that much is true. Lyrics don't become a center piece in the first two tracks,
Philosophy of a Wife Beater and
Worthless which rely heavily on distortion and feedback; but both utilize some really creepy muttering and whispering which I felt really helped out the record. My favorite track though is
A Cunt Like You, which really delves into new territory with excellent distorted percussion alongside Will's excellent screeching. His more argumentative approach to yelling is probably one of the album's biggest strengths. He gets even more aggressive in
Daddo, with the drumming becoming even more disgustingly loud and obnoxious, it really brings out the animal in this record.
Private is an arrangement of interviews of domestic abuse victims for twenty minutes. Whether or not this track impacts you will really depend on your own viewpoint.
Did Will really get scared by this album？ Why？ I think I know the answer, but it isn't what people might think. You want to know the real fucked up thing about this album？ The fact that people will consider this a worse crime than someone who brutally rapes and murders multiple people and doesn't get caught for a long period of time. That's the real tragedy and that's what I think scared William the most. The fact that our society's priority list for what crimes are worse than others is horribly screwed up and biased based on irrelevant details regarding their person. Will knew that more people would be emotionally impacted by this record than Twice is Not Enough or Dedicated to Peter Kurten and for the first time he realized that that Stalin quote wasn't far off the mark.
One death is a tragedy. One million deaths is a statistic.
