Dr Slaggleberry – The Slagg Factory
Filed under: Album Reviews by Mick5 Comments »
Billed as masked math-metal monsters, with the ability to blend “math metal”, progressive rock, “jazzcore” and “experimental sounds”. Now, I’m happy to take their word for it, and concede that they may well have blended all of the above. The result is rather similar to blending all of the primary colours. The individual ingredients might be very nice to look at, but the mess that drips out the back end isn’t.
Their first song of the EP is Feed Me a Stray Cat. If I was to exclude the first 3 minutes, I would give a fairly average review. The riffs aren’t terrible and, excluding the drummer, they all sound like fairly capable musicians. The first 3 minutes, however, sounds like I’ve accidentally pressed play on 2 different songs. There is no harmony between any of the instruments, it doesn’t sound like they are playing the same songs, or even the same genre of music. The drummer is extremely weak, and is quite possibly flailing at the drums blindly.
With that awful track out of the way, it’s on to track number 2, 13 Grades of Filth
. I don’t want to immediately label it as “more of the same” without giving it a fair shake, and it is definitely a vast improvement, but definitely not good. I get the impression that the band were in the same room while writing the music for this, but probably didn’t talk to each other.
845 is the third track, and the intro is immensely better. There is some tune to the guitars playing, and the drummer has taken a break. Two thirds of the way into the song, they turn up the distortion on their amps and turn down the quality of the music they are playing.
Bastard Brew is terrible, it should be resigned to the same level of hell as Feed Me a Stray Cat
, and I won’t say any more about it.
Gone Devil is slightly promising. The bands musical abilities really show in this track. There is at least some semblance of a tune, and some organisation to the song. If the first half of Gone Devil is the sound the band were going for, they have failed in every other track, if not, they set out to make terrible music, and succeeded.
The word clusterfuck comes to mind, as do the phrases stupid, poor quality and WHY DID THEY NOT LISTEN TO THIS BEFORE THEY CONSIDERED IT FINISHED. It seems Dr Slaggleberry want attention for going against the grain. Slag? HEE HEE, that’s a rude word! Bastard? HEE HEE, so is that!! Their single “scat” from 2008, doesn’t help either. It seems using rude words isn’t enough any more to be considered edgy, especially for a metal band, so I assume that is why they released this clusterfuck (see, it came to mind) of ear-bleedingly bad, musical masturbation.
Don’t bother with them, if you like metal, you won’t like these guys. If you like music, that’s not what they’re all about. If you like feeling uncomfortable, and stopping your neighbours from sleeping, give them a go, I guess they’ve got to be useful somewhere.
Do I need to give a star rating? If so they get half a star.
Rating: 
The band also left an Inbeteweeners reference on the back of the insert. Written in Wingdings, is “You Are A Bus Wanker” (You Are A Bus Wanker
)
, thanks guys, very metal.
