Review Summary: FUCKING AMPED METAL HELL YEAH
Hip-hop's longstanding struggle over MCs' realness is well documented, but if there was ever a genre to have cause to fear infiltration by studio gangstas, METAL has to be it. All these armchair satanists trying to think up new ways to hype the same old war, chaos, anarchy without even punk's allowances for sex-and-drug fueled hedonism before going home to love their wife, look at pictures of kittens, and go to bed at a reasonable hour. All this pussy shit is a very hard sell. It's a good thing METAL FUCKING RULESpizzaemoji or it would be too easy to write off the genre altogether and all the more so because like hip-hop the top40 cancer calling itself "mainstream" roundly rejected realness for studio satanists in a cosmological blink of an eye.
Like every other fraud pretending toward authenticity METAL and particularly that of the heavier variety the studio satanists maintain an unwavering po-faced commitment to ALL SERIOUS ALL THE TIME. But it would seem we've all collectively forgotten the
less serious covers of HEAVY METAL magazine, the ones with jellybean clockmen and monkey cosmonauts and flying T-Rexes surfing spaceships. You know, the
fun. Where's all the
fun? Can we maybe get a little levity between all the GRIM and DARK?
Enter FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO, proper spelling is SHOUTING. FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO IS G--is good, but what makes them
great is that they're willing to have fun. Granted, I don't actively keep up with the METAL scene anymore (see: above paragraphs), but I can't remember the last time I saw METAL having this much fun. From minute one of the humorously named WHY DO YOU LOVE ME SATAN it's abundantly clear that FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO is having the time of their lives. Everything from their hooks to their solos to their literal screaming screams is them enjoying themselves immensely. They're just happy to be here.
That's not to say WHY DO YOU LOVE ME SATAN isn't heavy, because it certainly is. My experience has been that metal is a three-way tug of war between HEAVY, METAL, and listenable. Too HEAVY and you have the GRIMDARK-for-its-own-sake kind of sludge METAL that has to sacrifice all the pace, energy, and excitement to be as DARK and BROODING as possible. Too METAL and it's indistinguishable from radio static. Worst of all, too listenable and it's Huey Lews and the News. FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO solves this problem by making it HEAVY and METAL, but cheating the "listenable" part by being so damn high energy. This amazing energy is why I'm so certain they're having fun and equally certain you will as well.
"High energy" doesn't mean "one-note" and I can confidently say that WHY DO YOU LOVE ME SATAN reaches the lofty heights of punk's *two* notes. Just enough variety to keep the music fresh but few enough to keep it laser focused on keeping the horns up from start to finish. If you haven't, next time you listen to your METAL LP du jour see how long you can keep those horns up. There's an important lesson here. Two, actually.
First, if you're not headbanging in the first minute is it really METAL? Second, it's
really hard to keep that headbanging, the proper horns-in-the-air METAL energy going for a long time. Proper METAL, or at the very least of this variety needs to be active and punchy, and that's really hard to keep up for a long time. Most longer and even some mid length METAL LPs really start to flag later on. It really is one of those things where less is more.
Once again, FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO knows exactly how long it takes for arm aches and dizziness to set in, and keeps it trim at just over a half hour altogether. Exactly long enough to leave you wanting more. How all METAL should leave you. Oh, and saving the best for very last with the closer―a rare feat of discipline―certainly helps.
I suppose I could talk about the music itself, but what's there to say? It's METAL. There's guitar, bass, drums, and lots of shouting. It's everything great METAL should be and doesn't try to be what it's not. That mastery of craft and scope is to be lauded, and no matter how big or small your collection is there's absolutely room for FUCKING WEREWOLF ASSO in it.
