In the grand memory bank of Simpsons quotes, my mind is cast back to the episode where Marge got a job as an estate agent. As her boss informed her, there was a certain code required for selling property – the kitchen is not small – it’s cosy. The house is not falling apart, it’s a handyman’s dream…and so on. They are not lies, merely a positive spin on a negative truth, and a great salesman could probably sell you a bag of excrement if he chose his words just right. And Gravewurm is quite possibly the closest thing to faecal matter in aural form we are likely to experience. The PR blurb for this album is fairly typical of Hells Headbangers;
“From the deepest pit of the American underground crawls the cult GRAVEWURM…darkest, ugliest, swampiest blackdeath.”
Yes, HH records are typically ugly, nasty and downright filthy to put it nicely and just to clear something up I have given their releases far more positive reviews than I have bad ones. Filth is good and sometimes seriously raw and ugly black/death/thrash is just what the doctor ordered. Bestial Mockery, Deiphago, Perversor, Vomitor…all fine purveyors of filth that have me wanting to bang my head and bring me closer to the fiery pits of hell…but then my necromanticizing came to an abrupt halt when I heard Blood Of The Pentagram and realised that sometimes what is said on the rusty, dirt-covered tin is just a clever way of marketing shite and no more than a way of justifying terrible musicianship and a blatant absence of ideas.
‘Goat Command’ is the first of twelve tracks and the only command my brain is processing is to turn of turn off this god awful racket. The guitars are dirty and sludgy, but also mindnumbingly repetitive and that applies to the whole album not merely the first track. The thing is that half way through the second track I find myself laughing so hard at their desperate attempts to sound evil and grim that it really blows any chance it ever had of dragging me into their filth-encrusted world. Everything kind of seems like it’s just too much effort, as though it’s being played by a couple of numbskull Kevin And Perry types in badly applied corpsepaint in a messy bedroom which mother keeps nagging them to tidy up. “But muuum, we’re too satanic to pick up after ourselves. So unfair!”
So we’re dragged ‘Deeper Into The Dungeons’ and speaking of which this would be a great album for torture chambers everywhere…send the prisoner half to sleep…wake them up just as they are drifting off…haha you can’t escape the CULT OF GRAVEWURM you maggot! zzzzzzzzzzAAAAAGH! This one has a sludgy, kind of doomish approach and crawls along at the pace of a tar-coated snail. The bass is fuzzy, lo-fi and nasty while the drums are triggered and artificial sounding. The vocals are just the stale, shit-flavoured icing on the fucking cake, in fact it’s what I imagine Dani Filth would sound like if he had a bad throat infection and tried singing right after vomiting up razors. It’s a whispered and feeble rasp that doesn’t deviate from that one same flat note even once throughout these twelve tracks. Laughably bad! On ‘Necromance’ a bit of melody in the vocals would go a long way to improving things and giving it a bit of atmosphere that I could actually take seriously.
Really, I am amazed I have managed to listen to this album three times and just about managed to keep myself from drifting to sleep on every occasion. They clearly want to sound like they just crawled out of the sewers of hell, but as filthy and nasty as this sounds I just can’t take it seriously enough to want to go there. There’s no variation – it’s like hearing the same song…the same riff over and over on a loop, and frankly it just sounds dull. Sorry Hells Headbangers, you failed to sell me the turd on this occasion…better luck next time.
http://www.myspace.com/gravewurm
