Review Summary: The Band That Wouldn't Die, Part 7: Don’t Give a F*ck About Punk Rocking No More
Well… At least they were trying.
Really- Say what you will about
The Dwarves Must Die, but it’s clear Blag and his buddies were really, honestly trying to stretch outside their comfort zone and do something different. To say this album is “all over the place” would be a grand understatement. in addition to your tried-and-true hardcore and pop punk, everything from 60s surf rock to industrial-ish chugging to bloozy hard rock to out-and-out hip hop and turntable scratching is touched upon here. As one might expect, it is… something of a mixed bag.
There are some great moments here. “Downey Junior” is as punchy and satisfying as anything off Young and Good Looking, “Dominator” is wonderfully headbangable despite lacking a proper chorus, and I’ll always have a Utah-sized soft spot for Blag’s less-than-affectionate ode to my hometown, “Salt Lake City”.
But then there’s the rest of the album. There’s a part of me that wants to defend
The Dwarves Must Die- It is, after all, the first Dwarves album I heard, and the one that initially got me into the band- but alas, there’s just no way around it.
The Dwarves Must Die is a mess, plain and simple. Opener “Bleed On” is too fast to serve as a more subdued, atmospheric introduction, but lacks the energy and verve to really kick the album off with a bang. On “Runaway No. 2”, Blag’s voice sounds incredibly out of place against the backdrop of acoustic guitars, and the first verse depicts both of the protagonists committing incest for basically no reason. “Demented”, though better than a hip-hop track by the Dwarves has any right to be, is still neutered by a lumbering, moronic chorus, and “Massacre” fares even worse, resorting to lazy potshots at Good Charlotte and Queens of the Stone Age (The latter of which hilariously inspired Josh Homme to crack a beer bottle over Blag’s head months after the album’s release).
Clumsy genre-hopping aside, the worst thing about
The Dwarves Must Die might be that, for the first time, the Dwarves’ trademark offensiveness felt forced and unnatural. On their ‘90s records, their shtick worked so well because they really, truly sounded like drugged-up, violent scumbags (because, well, they kind of were). In the context of a polished, big-budget rock album, the hard-living badass posturing began to ring increasingly hollow, and without consistently solid songwriting to fall back on, the façade was even less excusable. But hey, at least they were trying, something it became a lot harder to say as the Dwarves entered their third decade as a band...
