Album Review: Crème Flesh - For Your Ass Only
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Sultry dusk swoops in to cradle the daylight, soft embrace split by a V of swans tracking their course overhead. She stands at the balcony, framed by green seas of oak and ash in silent vigil for miles around. A tail of cigarette smoke slips it’s languid coils skyward, lavish and unperturbed by the sturm und drang of impassioned human revelry two sliding glass doors away in the casino behind her. Profit and loss, jubilation and devastation, high highs, low lows. He watches her, a curvaceous eclipse of the dimming forestry splayed like a map before her. His pocket rings with her coin.
“All luck, you know” she says. Eastern European, by accent. “A pair of 3s. Who would’ve bet a kings ransom on that?”. Her “R”s roll like fine tobacco, and she turns to face him. Her eyes slant into dark slits, brows crunched into stark crags above them. Mouth pursed in a taut rouge wound, jaw set like plaster. Shadows lengthen, yet world seems darker still about her. He feels desire tighten within him; as though within the fury lay a lure, prey for the chasing, a sheer wall to scale with seduction. He takes an unhurried step forward, pale martini at a luxuriant oily swirl in it’s glass, cocks an insouciant eyebrow:
“As the lonely soldier would know, you don’t need a queen if you’ve a fine hand”.
“...what?” she responds. Rage fades, confusion reigns. He presses the advantage:
“Confucius says, the man who puts cream in a tart is not necessarily a baker”.
Bewilderment descends with the flutter of bank notes surrendered to the luck of an imbecile. She stares at him, contempt melting away in the furnace of his idiocy, and stammers only one of a million questions flooding her consciousness:
“I...you...who?”
“Shlong. James Shlong”.
Slam can be tricky thing to nail, but if you do it right the result is some of the most crushing music available. Bands like Agonal Breathing, Gargling or Diphenylchloroarsine feel like being caught in a collapsing cave system, or some other catastrophically violent end involving being smashed like toothpaste beneath a forklift. So the dream whenever I pick up anything slammy is always that I’ll be in for a similarly unremitting assault. Stepping up to the plate is Canada’s own irreverent sons Creme Flesh with a steaming bowlful of wholly tasteless palm-muted porn parodies. Irredeemable filth? From the band that made the “Casablumpkin” album? Surely you jest! (for those unaware, a blumpkin is the receiving of a blowjob while having a poo. Which seems unsanitary, but if you’re in the toilet anyway I suppose it’s a two-birds-one-stone sort of situation). Endearingly adolescent wordplay like “Lake Flaccid” is par for the course with this genre, but ultimately, what I’m hoping for is the sense of being rammed headfirst through a brick wall. How are we on that front?
We’re O.k? If that makes sense. The band are clearly having a good time and no one is trying to push any envelopes here, and if I turn my IQ down low enough the chimpanzee fight riffs of “No Cunt for Old Men” are hard not to enjoy. The band are clearly having a good time and while there isn’t the raw menace of “Molesting the Decapitated” by Devourment (for example) the band are clearly steering for more lighthearted territory here. Its main drawback is how formulaic it is – every riff, groove, and gurgle is either deeply familiar (if you’re feeling charitable) or deeply generic (if you’re not). I’m not saying that it’s boring – when the coffee kicks in on “MILF of Magnesia” at 2.05 and that high-tuned snare starts blasting along with shrill pinch harmonic scalpels it’s a riot for all involved. There’s lethal grooves abounding, and they work in the moment, but nothing really stapled itself to my memory after the fact. I’ll get to that uncivilised bout of triplet-ridden unruliness at 1.35 of “Jagged Little Penis” where it grooves like it’s going out of fashion and there and then it entertains, but the appeal is ephemeral. Obligatory samples aside, I’m not sure I’d be able to match any of these songs to their names, and in a year’s time there’s not a chance I could distinguish any of these tracks from a lineup of genre compatriots. It all sits in this basket of “decent enough” that means the songs never got old or overstayed their welcome, but equally they never hung around even if I might have liked them to.
Slam is an acquired taste, and if you have it then Creme Flesh might well tide you over. I can appreciate their love of the game but it’s hard to recommend them over a similar but better band like, say, Party Cannon. That goes further still when we reach the real monsters of deep that lurk in lowest fathoms of genre. That said, it is undeniably fun, but like...I’m trying praise this in a way that that doesn’t sound dismissive, and I feel as though I’m coming up short. I listen to a lot of black metal that presents itself with a very straight face, and the same goes with much of the grindcore I listen to – often very political, often very earnest in it’s sentiments too. I was going to say that Creme Flesh present a nice palette cleanser to the endless cascade of deadly serious stuff life is chucking unconsented into our faces, but that feels ludicrously condescending towards something that someone put effort into, so lets close on a friendlier note: If you like slam, and you like brutal death, then “For Your Ass Only” will scratch a lot of itches for you. It blasts, grooves and grunts in complete accordance with the natural order of things. It doesn’t take itself remotely seriously, and is likely better for it. I can’t say it’s especially likely that it’ll be on my end of year list, but hey, sometimes a few fun slams is all you need for a good time.
