Iwrestledabearonce - Ruining It For Everybody Review
Posted by Wyatt E. on 07.30.2011
Right off the bat - best album title of the year.
Oh, these pricks.
Oh, and to get me in the mood for reviewing music by a geeky band like this, I spent like 24 hours straight on TVTropes.org. Yeah. That.... that was my reason.
1. Next Visible Delicious - 2:40
2. You Know That Ain’t Them Dogs' Real Voices - 2:58
3. Deodorant Can’t Fix Ugly - 3:17
4. This Head Music Makes My Eyes Rain - 3:24
5. It Is “Bro” Isn’t It? - 2:39
6. Gold Jacket, Green Jacket - 2:24
7. Break It Down Camacho - 2:53
8. Stay to the Right - 2:29
9. I’m Gonna Shoot - 2:37
10. Karate Nipples - 3:06
11. Button It Up - 3:19
I'm fairly sure that this past decade was the only decade that could have possibly spawned Iwrestledabearonce. Explaining them is almost a chore in itself, but to keep it brief: IWABO are a death metal(?) five-piece with severe ADHD who dip heavily into hardcore and grindcore territory, and without warning spiral off into any genre they feel like playing at any given moment. (Surely Mike Patton would be proud.) Most songs start out with a fierce attack of hardcore... mathcore... whatever it's called; I don't keep up with you kids all that well. At any rate, the vocals wind up being a lot of "ARGHBWAUGHAAAAAGGHHHBLAAAAAGGGHHHHH" and then suddenly we have a goth rock number, or some bad, out-of-tune hoedown, all sung sweetly by a short girl in little hipster glasses. Don't get comfy, though; this bitch will shriek at you at top volume till your hair's white.
I love you, dream woman!
So you're probably thinking "oh, this band's trolling us" and that's probably not far off the mark. Well, actually it'd be more accurate to say they refuse to take metal seriously. It's not because they aren't competent at playing metal music - they're like a B-level The Dillinger Escape Plan, basically - but it's simply a jumping-off point for them to just play, well, anything. Their debut EP alone had tangents into trance, modern jazz, power metal, trip hop and synth pop, because... well, just because. It's all song fragments strung together without much rhyme or reason. And don't expect much in the lyrics, either, which - incomprehensible as they may be - is just a series of statements that are so excessively cryptic, it probably wouldn't matter if you could make them out. Whether or not this is intentional, given the band's mildly goofy demeanor, is up for debate, but at least they all had fun stringing this mess together.
Hell, look at the merch section on their website - there's more pop culture references there than the entire last season of Family Guy. One shirt mimics Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone, another looks like a kid's cereal box, another has a weirdly drawn Pee-Wee Herman, and another has bright rainbow letters reading Metal Just Got Gay (uh... yay Pride?) So with that level of dork humor, I don't have to tell you that the reception to this band has been mixed. One camp is calling them a guilty pleasure, the other camp is a little less kind and refers to them as hipsters who shouldn't be taken seriously. Ruining It For Everybody (instantly my new favorite album title ever, by the way) won't change the tides - this is more IWABO than they've ever been, if that's even possible. There's still nutso time signatures, monstrous growls (she's like 4'11, isn't she?), breakdowns, sudden forays into clean and operatic vocals, synths, and whatever else they feel like wedging into their composition.
Notably, they're getting even more brazen in their stylistic shifts - one song, "This Head Music Makes My Eyes Rain," is entirely devoted to ambient techno and whispered vocals, which you'd think would be jarring, but oddly comes as a relief considering everything it's sandwiched in between. They also know well enough to see one of their flights of fancy through when it works well enough - "Deodorant Can't Fix Ugly" ends with a soaring, chanted chorus that sounds kind of awesome, so the track just ends with that. By the way, I briefly considering doing the entire review as one word but that would have been stupid.
The thing is, Iwrestledabearonce really are a technically proficient band who are perfectly competent at their instruments. They aren't the tightest band in the universe, but they're very convincing at whatever they're doing, which is a key to Ruining It For Everybody hitting as hard as it does despite it all. Something else to make note of is the fact that vocalist Krysta gets better and better with each album. On the debut EP, she had all the guttural growls down pat, but when she sang she had a tendency to overreach with it and get a little breathy, so some of their ADD-leaps in style sounded a little more forced. She sounds better here and a lot more natural. She may still hitting a sour note once in a while, but hey, so does Björk.
Now, I won't lie to you and say this band has a particularly long shelf life. Iwrestledabearonce is cheap thrills, and they work best on that level, but there's a reason Mindless Self Indulgence aren't making as many underground waves these days. The band have a fun thing going and all, but with every successive album, one starts to wonder how long they can stretch it out before something gives - either they start to get serious, or the audience does, and I dunno if either of those scenarios has potential to end well.
The 411: As it stands, Ruining It For Everybody is, like all of their albums, fun in small doses, whether for cheap laughs or whether it's to indulge your incredible attention deficit disorder. They may appeal to a small niche, but if you're in that niche, this is a brick shithouse. Good times. So now what?
