Where they from?
Waterbury, Connecticut. I don’t talk about it very much, but I actually lived in southern Connecticut from the ages 5 to 11, and let me tell you, that place was insufferably boring. I remember as we were getting ready to move the big news was that our town had finally built a movie theater! Like, wow, what incredible modernization! All we’ll need now is a railway station and a post office and we’ll be like all them big-timers in New York!
Why the hype?
A few months ago as I was obsessively checking the website www.twitter.com to see which asshole would be the next president of this godforsaken country, I happened upon a tweet from a mysterious entity known simply as “BIG DREW” who was posting about a demo from a new musical project that sought to combine elements of ignorant east coast hardcore with goregrind. On a lark, I clicked on the link, figuring that such a combination would be intriguing if pulled of correctly but the chances of this were quite low because if there’s one thing that writing this column for the past two years has taught me, it’s that most bands simply suck.
I was beyond delighted when I listened to this demo and realized that these crazed Connectictuers had actually pulled off their stated musical mission for the most part. Squashed Beef definitely leans slightly more hardcore than grind but I feel like that for the most part this works in the bands favor. The blast beats are sloppy, but the good kind of sloppy, like, “fit the music” kind of sloppy and the guitar riffs are childishly ignorant but like, isn’t that the point? This is a band that has a very specific goal for what it wants its music to be and pretty thoroughly achieves that, which is way more than I can say about your typical art school powerviolence band or any modern death metal group that spends more time on sick merch than what their actual music sounds like.
Latest release?
DEMO-GLACE I’ve been listening to this thing for almost two months before I picked up that every song title is a burger pun. I guess this might be a burger-themed band? Did you know the Goodburger film has a novelized sequel in which Kel’s character goes to France to return some guys change that he left at the restraint? My friend and I ordered two copies of it from Amazon for one cent a piece. The shipping cost two dollars.
