Review Summary: By improving their sound, Dr. Acula has become less interesting than they were before.
Dr. Acula isn't really the band you go to for technical precision, or for a meaningful listening experience. Dr. Acula with their last album, S.L.O.B., proved themselves as a joke. Their vocalist was bad, the guitars were stale, and the electronics were childish. With Below Me they have become a little more serious, and a little worse.
This album suffers from the same problems that the previous album did. The vocals, while improved quite a bit, are still well below average. The pig squeals are greatly reduced on this album, and the screams and death growls have become stronger and less of a joke. Instead of the vocals on the last album, which were clearly a joke and weren't to be taken seriously, the vocals on this album are just bad. Only the spoken word parts still have the humorous tendencies of the past album.
The guitars are extremely simple. Almost everything is played on the two lowest strings. There are some simple leads and dissonant screeching, but most of it is just chugging eighth notes, sometimes with rests in between them! There is bass on this album, and if you listen for it you can hear it, but it's nothing special. The drums on this album are probably the best thing about it, and even then they aren't really even that good. They keep pace, the double bass is overused but steady, and they do nothing but serve there purpose, something that nothing else on this album does. All the instruments on the album sound better though, due to the greatly improved production.
The reworked tracks from S.L.O.B., like Night of The Living Dummy and Shocker On Shock Street, suffer from the increased production. While the songs are cleaner and more polished than their counterparts, the production kinda ruins them. The only thing that the production hasn't changed is the synths, which are just as bad as ever. If there is anything that did need to be changed on the last album, it was the synths.
Dr. Acula, with Below Me, have lost much of what made them unique in the first place. On this album they sound less like Dr. Acula and more like Annotations of An Autopsy. If you're looking for a laugh, you may like this, but I would definitely recommend S.L.O.B. over this. Still, if you liked the last album but couldn't stand the vocals, then this should leave you feeling pretty content, though underwhelmed. For the rest of us, it's just a bad joke.
