Part of me wants to just do the Spinal Tap thing and write a two word review, but even that sounds like more effort than Mulletcorpse is worth. I mean, on one hand, they have a band name so blisteringly stupid that I can't help but try to convince myself that the band itself has to be good, but on the other hand, they truly do just suck.
They suck in a sort of weird way though, because they can play their instruments just fine, the recording sounds immaculate for the death/grind style they go for, I even think the low, roaring deathcore bellows sound nice. The issue lies in their complete and utter inability to write anything with even the minutest semblance of coherence. If you can follow me for a second into a completely different genre, I'd like to talk about Il Était Une Forêt... by QCDSBBQ stalwarts, Gris. I'm not particularly a fan of the album (it's just not my style), but I absolutely adore the quiet closing track, "La Dryade". I've heard it criticized as a poorly written classical piece because there's absolutely no flow to it. It's just like eight separate parts all cut up and placed in a random order, and ergo, no matter how good those individual pieces are, the hasty assembly hinders the overall quality. I don't agree in that context based on how fucking gorgeous those eight parts are, but I understand it. Mulletcorpse does the same thing, except all of their individual parts are comprised of hackneyed blasts and grind riffs with out-of-nowhere Brain Drill sections and breakdowns that aren't quite ignorant enough to be enjoyable.
That's really the whole album in a nutshell, it doesn't lend itself to deep analysis because there's nothing to analyze further than face value. Every haphazardly slapped together moment lacks the sort of charisma or flashiness to draw attention to it. Mulletcorpse is basically the stitched together, Frankensteinian monster of twelve different bands that could never make it past the demo stage. Like, I could point out the brocore shouts in "Life: Unwritten" or the incongruent consonant shredding on "The Fermented", but none of it matters because the entire album is made up of fifteen second snippets of different songs with nothing to tie them all together. It's not particularly limp or anything, on paper it sounds fine enough to groove along to every now and again, and the jerky transitions between ever-so-slightly-different styles isn't nearly as jarring as I might make it seem, but it's still shitty because none of it stands out. It's almost more offensive in its mediocrity than any abject awfulness. Basically it's not worth listening to for the handful of cool sections amongst the swamp of Rings of Saturn emulation and Veil of Maya theft.
RATING - 40%
