Artist: Perverse Osmosis
Title: Swarm, Kobold, Swarm!
Label: Save vs. Poison Records
Type: Album
To coin a very much overused phrase, it takes all types to make the metal world revolve, including the strange, the bizarre, the peculiar and the ones that blatantly warrant a much earned “What…tha-fuck?!?” This rabble of Baltimoreans is not only made up of D&D geeks, but claim to be all about the knowledge-seeking academia (hmm). On the whole, I’m not really one to pay close scrutiny to lyrical themes, but somehow this idea doesn’t really seem fitting with their sound. Swarm, Kobold, Swarm gives a whole other meaning to the word silliness. Imagine the outcome if a band like Municipal Waste were locked in a studio with bucolic balm-pots Korpiklaani, with a weekend supply of beer (yes, that would be a lot!) and some shoddy instruments to play. On one hand, it seems like such a logical pairing; two fun styles of music fused together…but on the other hand, very disparate sounds…
Perhaps this proves the theory that two positives do in fact make a negative can be applied to music as much as physics. While on their own, beer bongs and chucking beach balls around to the ‘Waste is a great laugh, or dancing a folksy jig while being drenched in a shower of beer a huge amount of fun, when brought together it just becomes a little too chaotic. The styles don’t mesh together all that well, and besides, there are so few styles of music that can get away with such rawness, so why spoil it with fluffed-up instruments? I mean, it would be like a punk band teaming up with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. It doesn’t make much sense…
And then somewhere down the line, around the third or fourth listen, it dawns on me that, rather like Sideshow Bob after treating his mortal enemy to a final HMS Pinafore medley, I have grown accustomed to their sound…To the energetic, hyper-harmonies of ‘Super Skunk’, and the beleaguered buzzing of ‘Kobold Swarm’. To the manic jazz-improv infused ‘Berzerker’, and to the funky, punky ‘Make It Today’ with it’s catchy clap-along rhythms played out in frantic double time….and especially to the ‘Happy Little Boozer’ mimicry of ‘Tiger in an Ascot’. There is something rather likeable about this lot, whether it’s their raw energy or the sheer fun factor of it all. It’s completely bonkers, and it is incredibly chaotic…but it’s all a good laff (sic)! Self-proclaimed intellectualists they may be, but refreshingly they are not projecting it in a pompous and condescending way. As a fleeting MySpace visit informs me, they haven’t got much of a clue what they are doing, but they are having fun! Right on!
www.myspace.com/perverseosmosis
Luci Herbert
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