Review Summary: Can death metal get any worse than this?
I wasn't coming into The Smut Circus with high hopes. With one of the worst album covers i’ve ever seen and absolutely deranged song titles, it sure sets expectations. But let me just get to the music itself.
40 minutes is a long time for brutal death metal, so I at least expect for it to be worth it. This project uses samples in the worst way imaginable. As soon as the album starts, its poorly edited samples are sure to kill brain cells. These are littered throughout and don’t get better. For the music itself it takes cues from modern slam death metal with how they’re used. All of the samples pertain to Clay Lamanske’s obsession with rape and drugs.
Clay handles everything, from production to vocals. And it sure shows. He has a strange way of doing inhaled vocals, which he calls the cricket technique. It doesn't sound very good here. Production wise, it sounds like the guitar is recorded through a mattress, and the drum machine cuts through everything like a knife. It’s so in the mix it’s kind of annoying. The riffs are lackluster for the most part, and the ones that sound decent are so muffled that it lacks any punch.
There are a few slams that are actually pretty good, so I will give this album that.
From what i can gather, the lyrics and themes also seem to center around pedophilia sometimes. Is it a ‘dark sense of humor’, or not? The world may never know. I may just be taking “Little Girl Gonorrhea” too seriously. And if rumor is to be believed, this dude might just be very mentally ill and uses music as his outlet.
Yeah, I'm not sure what will top this in terms of terrible death metal. But it will sure take a lot.
