3 out of 5

Label: Sony

Producer: J.G. Thirlwell

So does J.G. compromise for his first major label release?  No, not really.  You’ve got a track called ‘Take It Outside Godboy’ and an 11-minute long track with like a 5-minute straight swing interlude, plus plenty of the industrial stomp you’ve come to expect from Foetus.  However, we can never really know what kind of feedback groups get when they jump to a major, before the recording is made, during editing, whatever, and while Gash gets off to a fuck-yeah start with some amazing tracks, it’s takes a dive into… not monotony, exactly, since the tracks are still good, but not the kind of momentum-fueled feeling that even slower Foetus tracks tend to have.  Once the songs pick their beat (and that beat is nigh the same for the majority of the album), they stick with it, adding some horns or noise on top but never really dropping the standard 4/4 (or whatever it may be), and that’s what feels like the concession here.  This tends to highlight a lack of development in a lot of the tracks as well, most apparent – to me – in ‘Slung’, that swing track, which has two pretty awesome paragraphs of lyrics and a badass thump of industrial jazzy flare, but once it makes its point a couple minutes in, it doesn’t do anything with it except repeat.  It seems like we’re getting somewhere when the song breaks for that interlude – with some nice production tweaking from Thirwell to give it a slight mechanical edge – but when the track comes back to heavy, it hasn’t added anything.  We’d already achieved the same effect prior to the break, so what’s the point of returning to it after?

Interestingly, it’s on ‘Downfall’ that the album mostly descends into this type of tedium.  Prior to this we get the awesomely lumbering ‘Mortgage’, followed by the energetic and noisy ‘Mighty Whity’ and ‘Friend of Foe’ and then a nice quiet-to-loud dynamic with ‘Hammer Falls.’  Thereafter Thirlwell shines through in moments, but nothing seems to break above the surface, and even J.G.’s vocals feel less than inspired except in select blips of awesome, like ‘Steal Your Life Away.’  The recording style is also a bit mashier than the clear-cut style used on many Foetus recordings, but it’s an interesting approach that assists some tracks in making their heaviness feel that much heavier, weighed down by sludge through which the thumping low end breaks through.

Not an unremarkable album by any means, but average by Foetus standards.