Anyone for some crunchy three-piece instrumental metal? Then read on.
This week, I was mostly getting down to Dr Slaggleberry’s new E.P, fresh from their crisply-recorded live XFM set, released on Crash records. With all the precociousness of Frank Zappa plus more turnarounds of tempo per minute than Biffy Clyro, Dr Slag delivers three tracks packed with mosh-tastic metal nuggets. Just like those voting for Senator Obama tomorrow, the tunes tick all the right boxes: abrasive, discordant, rhythmically-contorted, and featuring three musicians who are tight as the proverbial gnat’s rear quarters.

The EP kicks off with ‘Extra Strength Grandma’. Like a raging bull, Dr Slag charges full tilt from one idea to the next. He turns on a sixpence before changing direction completely. The ferocious drumming patterns accelerate, inflect, double-back and stagger sideways, the guitars and bass following in their wake. However, a few minutes in after a pretty glorious start, you get the creeping suspicion that something is not quite right. What’s missing? Well,  continuity. Development. All too quickly we realise we are facing fifteen minutes of artful snippets rather than proper songs. Were the Slags to chop the ‘Tails Of The Blind Donkey’ up into its eighteen constituent pieces, reorder them and stick them back together again, we would be none the wiser and none worse off

.
And one ploy is revisited time and time again: The Segue Splurge. Dr Blaggleberry delivers volley after volley of arhythmic notes to segue from each theme into the next. ‘Lead Rabbit’ suffers the most from this, lurching perilously close towards teenage navel-gazing bedroom noodles at times.

But for all my over-academic misgivings, you can’t put this one down. Your head just starts moving - I defy anyone to prove otherwise. It’s not the steady up and down AC/DC headbang: more of a psychotic lurch, but hey.  If you like it, then good on you. But if the segues to no-where get the better of you, then go look up Zomby Woof (live version) by Frank Zappa to see how it should be done.

 Dr Slaggleberry Myspace

 By B.M.

Tags: drslaggleberry

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 at 10:23 am and is filed under record review, review. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.