Album Review: Backengrillen - Backengrillen
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
The Lloyds Bank Coprolite is a fossilized piece of human excrement, thought to date from the times of the vikings. It’s notable for a few reasons, including the insights it provides into the diet and gastrointestinal complaints abounding at the time. However, the main point of interest is, beyond contention, it’s size. At eight inches long and two inches wide, it is a truly monstrous poo. And for the longest time, it stood uncontested as the biggest turd ever produced by mankind. And then Backengrillen went and recorded this thing.
The album grasps every second in cruel talons and pulls with all its misbegotten vigour such that each loathsome moment stretches into vast chasms to be traversed in fits of petrifying agony, wading through molasses studded with rust-rimmed shards paring torturous rents marrow deep in an interminable leng tch’e sentence of inconsolable misery. Cursed with aimless, somnolent repetition, it only calls pause to it’s coma-inducing campaign on your mental health to instead violate your personal space with a nonsensical spearhead of the most annoying fucking sounds you’ve ever heard in your life.
Vocal styles springboard with frenetic abandon between clean highs that wibble like a sack of silicone implants, to the pubescent yowl of a young Anthony Kiedis snapping mousetraps on his nipples, to hooting like Tarzan fucking an anthill, to the sort of maddened alingual howling you’d normally get by motorboating Gollum’s buttocks. It’s no better instrumentally either; “Dor For Langsamt” breaches the veil betwixt our world and Satan’s lavatory with an opening flurry of Moist, breathy, humid exhalations through some poor confused brass instrument mixed with sudden yelps, building an unconscionable soundscape something along the lines of a congested anteater sticking forks into a plug socket. The bass for the song is this angina-afflicted systolic two-note thump through almost the entirety of the song while a pink-panther-with-a-hangover saxophone line paces a directionless, meandering cursed pilgrimage around it, scuffed soles calloused with the unyielding monotony of it all.
It’s not that repetition can’t be effective – Neurosis cast crumbling edifices of tension and release out of it, SUNN O))) puppeteer enthralled audiences through aphotic miles of smothering murk with it, Bong spiral diaphanous psychedelia into their amber honey swells of warm distortion with it. Even at less meditative speeds, Bolt Thrower will ride a riff like Seabiscuit on his wedding night and summon hordes of raised horns in doing so. Repetitive music can and does work. But here? It feels just... mindless, devoid of any clear fix on where to go and what to do when it gets there. The liveliest track on here is “Repeater 2” – the central lyrical motif of which goes “Hey! Repeat it! Repeat it again!” and oh boy do they ever. It’s roughly twice as long as it needs to be, and sees fit to stuff itself with yet more unbearable Tourette’s tics. You see, another aggravating quirk of this thing is it’s habit of taking sequences that might in theory be enjoyable and then defiling them with indiscriminate picks from a grab bag of unspeakable stochastic inanities. Like what is the need for the noise at 1.53? Where for no readily explicable rationale the vocalist suddenly just goes “AaAaAaAaAaAaAaAaAaOW!!” as though his mission in life was to see how long he could sit on a radiator until he could smell his bum hair sizzling. One drum beat. One bass riff. An unknowable amount of vocal farting around. Unguided brass noodling by an inveterate sax offender. On and on and on and on until it brands it’s unloveliness into your cranium and cynically lobotomises every joyful memory, every hope for the future, every quiet wish that brighter days might yet chase the lurking gloom back to it’s decrepit crawlspaces in the cellars of your subconscious.
This is all intentional, by the way. Written and recorded within three days the band themselves define their work as “raw, stupid, gut instinct music”. The point was to make something unrefined and crude. I understand that, and obviously music doesn’t need to be tuneful or consonant or structured to be good, but that doesn’t automatically confer virtue on a piece absent of those things either. You can’t evade criticism with an assertion that it’s MEANT to be this irritating when every stray note of it feels to be played with the mission of making my life worse. This is awful on a level that outstrips the powers of English to divulge, and i’m not going to begin clapping for it just because no one expected to leave the studio with the next Master of Puppets on their hands.
Mounting the rearguard is “Socialism or Barbarism” and just like socialism this doesn’t work either. A burst of static that feels entirely overlong for an album that’s spent as much time messing about as this one has greets us in a formless poisson process of spiky burbling for a few minutes before it saunters off as the drums take over. In truth this isn’t the most objectionable track here; once it decides to stop playing with dead radio channels for the first three minutes it has a degree of energy to it, the brass and bass alter and shift passably enough, and the vocals aren’t the most annoying thing in the entire world. But after everything else this album has put me through i’m in no mood to indulge its eccentricities. It’s entirely too long. The intro adds nothing. The song fades out like it’s embarrassed to exist. The album has, in the grand tradition of showmen down the ages, saved the best for last – and even that is heavily flawed. It’s easy to talk shit. Much easier than it is to create something of your own, and then present it to the world for unflattering analysis.
Unfortunately, overly acerbic words seem to come easily to me – but even with that held in mind, I cannot overstate how unpleasant my time with Backengrillen was. The most charitable version of this review I could possibly write would still be scathing, and given that the group themselves define the diabolical feculence they’ve decided to bury me beneath as “stupid” I’ve felt less need to restrain the more defamatory sentiments at my fingertips. There is probably an audience for this somewhere – given the calibre of musician at the helm of it I wouldn’t be surprised if a level of interest is generated by the legacy of those individuals alone. And if you do find this worthy of your attention, more power to you – each to their own after all. But I could not stand Backengrillen’s work here. Their promo sheet advises that they are working on a followup – something “less stupid” (their words). I can only hope that it proves to be an improvement because as it stands, every second I have spent with this is one that I dearly wish i could have back.
