Review Summary: That one guy from that one label who's not Buckethead put out another punk album that's, unsurprisingly, fairly good.
Damian Master--more commonly known as “That One Guy from Colloquial Sound Recordings” --seems to be a rather busy guy. He’s no
Buckethead for sure, but the number of individual projects to which he contributes seem to number around half a dozen or more by this point, with a new release popping up rather often on the label’s Bandcamp page. For what is presumably a mostly one-man show, the man has a pretty nice discography of (mostly) punk and black metal releases under his belt.
And I’m totally assuming that "Master" guy is even involved in this “Prison Suicide” project; I can find no information regarding the project outside of its release date and a notice of how many cassettes have been printed for the demo, but the guy screaming across all four tracks on the minimalistically titled “
2016 demo”
does sound like he has the same very distinctive howl Masters tends to use across most of his affiliated releases. For all intents and purposes, then, I’m just going to assume the person(s) that wrote this five-minute punk assault is none other than
That One Guy from Colloquial Sound Recordings himself.
For a four-track, five-minute-fifty-two-second (I counted) punk demo,
2016 demo is unsurprisingly unsurprising; “Surface” starts at an unsurprisingly break-neck pace, spitting an unsurprising amount of punk attitude in your face before (unsurprisingly) slowing down to a groovier rhythm fifty six seconds in before rolling into the next track. Though I definitely blame Slayer for coming up with that now dead horse of a songwriting schtick, the quick and drastic shift in tempo clearly works for Colloquial’s newest darling release.
The rest of the demo follows along an unsurprisingly similar template, though with enough rhythmic and melodic diversity to keep the project’s caffeinated punk pieces interesting on their own merits; “In Passing” plays around with more melodic riffs, “Pulse” utilizes an interesting start-stop rhythm in its latter half, and “Escape” is far too short to actually write about outside the latter portion of this sentence. Unsurprisingly, (for those familiar with Colloquial’s catalog)
2016 demo is a solid, straightforward-as-you-can-get snippet of raw punk music. It’s clearly uninventive, unoriginal, (unsurprising!) and can be probably listened to in a shorter amount of time than it takes one to read these four blathering paragraphs describing its unsurprisingness in the first place.
Are you on board yet?