Artist: Superbutt
Title: Music For Animals
Type: Album
Label: Soul Food/Sonic Attack Records

This music reviewing lark is a strange but rewarding one, allowing as it does for me to sample music from all over the world. A quick look through my ever growing collection of CD’s and legal downloads (the only type I and MTUK endorse folks!), shows that whilst the majority of acts hail from the UK or US, there are still hundreds from further abroad, including, but not limited to, Germany, Australasia, the Nordic lands, and even Japan. However, I couldn’t spot any from Hungary, but that is now remedied thanks to that nation’s Superbutt with what is apparently their fifth album, ‘Music For Animals’. A quick bit of research on this new fangled interweb shows that this is arguably a pivotal release for the band, as barring vocalist and founder Andras Voros, it debuts an entirely new line up. Well, not knowing their history or prior products, I feel it is my duty to review the CD on its own merits.

Opener ‘Cleaver’ in many ways sets the tone for the whole album, cutting in with a massively hook laden guitars and a groovy bass line, all playing over repeated verses and choruses so redolent of nu-metal. This modern approach continues in ‘Best Plays’ where double kick drum breaks mix with harmonised chant along vocals, almost precision designed to appeal to the Five Finger Death Punch crowd. A dash of thrash joins the mix in the breakneck opening of ‘Natasha’, a tale of lust for a vampire, whilst there is more then a hint of Disturbed in ‘Of This Gloom’ and the heavily effects laden guitars.

Superbutt move away from this formula for a while in ‘Ugly Head’ where hints of hardcore and punk surface as the vocals wander away from the beat and the drums skins get an angry pounding, but the clean sound is swiftly back for ‘Evil Blues’, a track that true to its name has a nicely bluesy solo before the song builds up layer after layer into a massive crescendo ending.

This is thoroughly modern metal, with a clean, well produced sound at odds with the lo-fi effect that so many retro acts are going for at the moment. Superbutt is a band I could well imagine playing to festival crowds with their easy to get into sound, a sound they achieve without the reliance on samples and keys that so many nu-metal acts pepper their songs with.

http://www.superbutt.net

Spenny Bullen

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