Playlist

The Hard-ons, Very Exciting! (Bad Taste)
The album Very Exciting! by this Swedish outfit calling themselves the Hard-ons should be very exciting to all you 15 year-old white kids out there. Because what the world really needs right now is another pop-punk band with jangly guitars and whiney vocals, a la Green Day, the Offspring, Blink 182 and fill-in-the-blank. This is the aftermath of punk, devoid of all intelligence and anger, designed to manipulate you into feeling good, much like that “uplifting” queen of cunts, Celine Dion. Hey, I respect the fact that mallrats need a soundtrack to make out to, but why can’t they bring back Bon Jovi? Oh, wait, I forgot... This is fucking awful, I thought to myself as the candy-coated 7th track rolled up, so I skipped ahead to track 12, with the promising title “(Every Time I Hear) Techno (I Pray For Death)” and even that turned out to be some stupid joke. I pray that “It”, the evil dwarf from the Swedish Satanic metal band Abruptum, tracks these gaywads down and tortures their genitals for a few days. Maybe then they’ll be able to play music that excites me.

The Kills, Keep On Your Mean Side (Red Meat Heart)
The band name excited me. When I slipped it in my player, I thought I’d accidentally put in PJ Harvey. You know, one of those demo things, recorded back when Polly Jean was a lo-fi scream queen. Stripped down barebones blues punk a couple notches above the White Stripes (the guitar playing might not be as skilled as Jack White’s, but he steals nearly all his riffs anyway) with spoken interludes, apparently snagged from telephone conversations, to make it seem artsy. Not nearly as exiciting or original as Royal Trux, a band The Kills are constantly compared to. “Fuck the People” is the kind of love song you can swing your hips to when you’re really drunk. If your idea of kool is pretending you’re a junkie and wearing sunglasses when you’re home alone, you can either kill yourself or listen to the Kills.

Decapitated, Nihility (Earache)
These four conservatory-trained Polish teenagers are widely regarded as the great white hope of the metal underground, and for good reason: Nihility, their second full-length album, resonates with an astounding ferocity and technical prowess rarely heard in death metal. Decapitated isn’t content merely working within the genre; they feel the need to advance the composition of their music to a degree of near-perfection. Opening with an eerie soundscape that funnels into “Perfect Dehumanisation (The Answer?),” it’s easy to be taken in by the amazingly complicated fret-shredding and wrist-shattering skin-beating. Several listens later, I realized this is also a very bassy record. Equally severe in its rhythmic intensity and intellectual approach to its abject subject, Nihility may be best approached as a round ball frozen in space... Actually, it’s spinning faster than any of us can comprehend.