Album Review: Putrid Defecation - Tales from the Toilet
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
“Tales from the Toilet? What sort of mouth breathing dickhead would volunteer to review that?” you might well ask. Well...me. I am that dickhead. Irrespective of my compulsion to phrase everything in the most convoluted, needlessly loquacious fashion conceivable, I’m no sophisticate. I’m a troglodyte captured by the uneasy hope that if I can just bamboozle people with polysyllables they might mistake me for being remotely intelligent. The thing is that the reverse can also be true; there’s a subtlety to making stupidity compelling. It takes a deftness, a kind of sleight of hand to make absurdity work. A high art to the low brow, if you will. And Putrid Defecation...well, sadly it seems they rather fall on the wrong end of the bell curve on that particular front.
“Tales From the Toilet” is composed by a handful of Norwegian dung-spawned sewer urchins that would cherish in their hearts the sight of all christendom smeared with shite. Heaped turds about the befouled bells of yonder high spires, odorous and fly-wreathed, piled ordure tints ornate stained glass dun where light may pass at all, mottled gross hues splattered unkempt on reeking, urine-sodden floors turgid and seeping fat yellowed bubbles to bursty wetly on surfacing. All through cobbled streets flow bulky slicks of excrement, scabbed and crusted over in noisome clumps of blacks and browns, painting walls with cloying smears. Riding the maggot-strewn tide comes carpets of buzzing insects, flitting and popping through a stench so profound the air seems hazy as the first light of dawn to reeling drunks caught in aimless ambulations through slumbering streets on lonesome pilgrimages for the lowliest of watering holes. Gas belches through the mire, flinging gobbets to splatter and defile what higher ground remains. Windows drip filth, thinner streams running the maze between bricks while hardier chunks stick and roll their corpulence down the walls before plunging to merge with the slurry below. It’s turd worship by way of slam death, and whether or not that is going to appeal to you is going to depend on your tolerance for groove infused coprophilia. It’s juvenile to the point of parody and obviously not meant to be taken seriously, but being lighthearted provides no insulation against criticism, and the unfortunate reality is that the joke wears thin real fast here. The music itself is competently performed, but conventional to the point of exasperation. It’s bouncy chromatic slams are adequate in and of themselves, but when they have to vie for a place at the tip of the food chain against bruisers like Kraanium or Peelingflesh, let alone the sovereigns of the genre like Devourment, they simply fade into the background like a silent but deadly in an empty fucking field.
The most annoying thing is that Putrid Defecation aren’t terrible, they’re just generic. Do you understand how awkward, how compromising, how frustrating that makes them to review? What am I to say here? “imagine Ingested, but literally shittier”? That should tell you all you need to know, but no, I gotta hang in here and try to wring some life out of music I find myself forgetting even as it’s fucking playing. Considering the subject matter it’s ironic it has such trouble sticking. Over and over I submerge myself in the toilet bowl as if I’m bobbing for fucking apples, only to find it dribbling away from my ears to pool listlessly at my knees. Periodic moments of inspiration do raise manure-heaped heads on occasion, with the beatdown hardcore riffs at 1:04 of “Airbourne Backdoor Evacuation” providing a highlight, or the 3/3 timing and uncommitted nods to melody on “Erfurt Latrine Disaster” raising momentary interest, but overall this album just bores me. It samples a variety of defecation adjacent sources, which would perhaps grate a little less if the rest of the album were of the luminary quality we all hope for whenever we listen to anything new, but as it is these things just add to the time I spend fighting to remain awake. I find myself pinned, objecting but impotent, force-fed from a conveyor belt of bland basic bitch slam by numbers riffs. What does the title track offer? This is the point at which you’d hope the band would hit their summit if the album is to be named for it, but no, something subpar this way wibbles. A collection of cookie-cutter palm mute riffs, okay but typical vocals, and entirely normative percussion. Again, not horrendous, but just...almost offensive in how unexceptional it is. “Impending Anal Leakage” for a half second seizes my interest with a fun bit of Grind application reminiscent of the almighty Regurgitate, but it can’t hope to resuscitate the release as a whole.
If you’ve ever wanted an album about accidentally violating yourself when your finger goes through the paper, this is the album for you. They can’t quite summon the sheer panic of realising you’ve no loo roll in the current cubicle and having to navigate your way to the adjacent one with your trousers around your ankles, their work is more the mild infuriation of realising that the paper is of cheap, insubstantial manufacture and thus you must triple or quadruple fold it in order to have a suitable wad of bottom wiping material. It’s average, painfully so, to the point that it was a legitimate struggle to write anything at all about it. Fist after fist I thrust with rising agitation into my thesaurus in a desperate search for synonyms for “boring”, only to find myself empty handed more and more frequently. “Tales From the Toilet” epitomises why slam routinely gets dismissed as a genre. Conventional to a fault, for genre enthusiasts only, and even those denizens of the viler domains in human musical endeavour are likely finding it hard to move for superior alternatives.
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