Birds of Prey
Weight of the Wound
Relapse
Multiple maniacs on the loose
God, retard jokes are boring. Even when set to music as crushing as the defiantly old school death metal sludge-hammers on “Mangled by Mongoloids (Ripped Apart by Retards),” the first track on this wrecking ball, retard jokes are boring. If these guys had any balls at all, they’d mock dim people who can fight back, like Ann Coulter or Victory Records.
Of course, it’s hard to take lines like “We never took the time to name them/ And put a tarp on the floor” and “The room stank of teenage retard incest” all that seriously; such is their eighth-grade gross-out worldview. But it’s a little disappointing coming from an otherwise fairly excellent little supergroup. Holed up in a Richmond studio (what better city for making sick jokes?), singer Ben Hogg of Beaten Back to Pure joined guitarists Erik “Alabama Thunderpussy” Larson and Bo “The Last Van Zant” Leslie, bassist Summer “Baroness” Welch, and Dave “Discordance Axis, Human Remains and about a million more” Witte and composed a tribute to their youth, the sort of death metal album you’d expect from the kind of guy who has alphabetically filed early Earache discographies (except for the Entombed albums, which clearly have been played FLAT). Leslie and Larson grind together, the bike chain slamming into the gears as Witte and Welch rev up the engine. The rest of the songs are fairly funny, all told: “Buttfucked With a Shotgun Barrel” is self-explanatory, “To Kill a Co-Worker” takes aim at the equal who won’t stop giving you shit, and “The Old Lady Rots (But the Checks Keep Coming”) hides mom’s corpse in the name of Social Security. The things Richmonders do.—Joe Gross
