Frownland

OLD - Old Lady Drivers

I’ve heard Lo Flux Tube, which is great, but I guess this is a totally different animal. It starts off with some formless noisy guitar and a chant from what I suppose are the Old Lady Drivers before hitting us with some OTT grindcore fun. Cool acoustic and funkier interludes between the grind and I’m loving this so far. “Corpse Full of Gunk” is full on grind and would be great live and is hilarious. Supermarket Monstrosity is grind with a kid or someone doing a kid-like performance. Meh, a little too gimmicky. “Lepers Without Feet” is some more kind of over the top grind, I guess they’re being tongue in cheek with it or something. “Tracheotomy Peashooter” gives us another pummeling grind track and has a really great interlude in it. Noisy and **** and over the top fun. The vocals are getting a little bit one dimensional at this point, but I don’t mind them. “Wisdom Lost” is a little more poppy with its intros and synths, with the vocals lamenting the loss of dentures. These sure are are some punny guys. Pretty catchy for a grindcore track. There’s a jammy part in the middle with clean guitars that’s cool but goes on a little too long for the sake of comedy. “Cocaine” is cheesy as **** arena rock with grind vocals. While slome of the other tracks have their flaws, this is the only one I’d say was bad. It might as well be Def Leppard and if you don’t think that’s a bad thing, you’re part of the problem. The double time psych freak out ending was a little neat though. “Die In Your Beauty Sleep”, a sentiment that we can all agree with, is goofy and fun as ****. Nice guitar outro too. These guys do a good parody of the rhythmic grindcore screaming. “Special Olympics” (lulz) is more of the same, not good, not bad, a little silly. It has an especially bull****ty early Slayer-esque guitar solo. “I Laugh As I Chew” has another more poppy intro before devolving into visceral aggression. As far as the grindcore elements go, this is probably the best track on the album so far, but I’m not a huge fan of the intro or the out of place glam metal outro. Let’s cut it out with the glam metal guys. “Colostomy Grab-Bag” does just that, with a groove metal riff intertwined with some Alice In Chains-esque guitar rhythms before going back to the grind. The acoustic elements of this song are done really well. “Feeling the Worms” is another solid grind track, not many novelty elements besides for 2 seconds of dub at the end. “Old Ladies Always Break Their Hips” (lulz) is another track a little too heavy on the glam instrumentally, but is actually pretty hilarious with the shrieks over it. Of course there are passages of pure grind fun on this track too, as is to be expected. “Bathrooms Rule” starts off like a college rock comedy song that makes me roll my eyes. The heavy element’s cool and all, but someone not into grind probably wouldn’t dig it. Some thrashy guitar soloing at the end, neat. “Screaming Geezer” is not that notable beyond the somewhat black metal element of it with the high pitched shrieking.

Final thoughts: Well that was a goofy, fun, occasionally badass album. Sort of like Ween meets Anal C[color=”black”]unt[/color]. I like Lo Flux Tube a lot better because the novelty elements sort of overshadowed a lot of this album, but it was still a fun record that I might return to. Some of the different sounds that they tried to be kind of grating (mainly the glam metal ****), some were more interesting (like “Colostomy Grab-Bag”). Overall I’d give it a 6.5/10

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