Agoraphobic Nosebleed is very frightening to me. They have such a total disregard for everthing. You won't find more extreme music or lyrics. They turn everything up to 10 and beyond. It's pretty sickening to listen to what they have created.
Here's my review of their latest 3" CD:
http://www.ultimatemetal.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=85723
Here's another review of it:
I'm going to be straight-up and dispense with any un-needed hyperbole: I don't how any collection of individuals could possibly put together a record of this... caliber. Clocking in at 21 minutes and featuring
100 tracks of the most sonically intense 600 bpm blasts ever created,
Altered States Of America's paradox continues to its aesthetic: all this music is juxtaposed onto a 3" mini-CD. Split up into several larger concept pieces, tracks 1 through 34 seem to be about the general malaise AnB sees around it -- if this is the way the four members of this band view the world, I don't ever want to be part of their perceptual fields. Songs 35 - 46 then explore a theme called the "Twelve Days Of Sodom." These furious exercises oftentimes last 5 - 15 seconds, and if each day passed as quickly as these twisted pieces of music do, we'd all be dying at an exponentially fast rate. Tracks 55-99 delve into the altered states of America. Tales of politics, drugs, heinous crime, pop culture and even Relapse Records (via track 83, the hilariously furious "Relapse Refusing UN Weapons Inspectors") are dispersed over either maximum grindcore or quick groove ("Bent Over The Cross", "5 Band Genetic Equalizer Pt. 3"). The most adventurous track is actually one of the most tame. "4 Leeches (40 000 Leeches)" sounds like
The Real Thing-era Faith No More; Mike Patton stands proud, no doubt. So, now that you know exactly what's going on here, I have a few key questions. Number 1: what social factors make an album as twisted and disparaging as this happen? Psychosis of this magnitude goes far and beyond mere school-yard teasing or bad break-ups. This is fucked up shit, and there's no eloquent way to articulate it. Secondly, how many narcotics were not only consumed, but mixed, during the creation of this mind-altering piece? Agoraphobic Nosebleed has just re-enforced every straight-edge belief I've held strong over the last long while, cuz if drug use leads to creativity of
Altered States Of America I'll just sit back and listen rather than create the stuff. Finally, do Carl Schultz and company read existentialist philosophy? If so, Soren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sartre are currently marvelling (in their metaphysical states of course... they're all long dead) at how this Agoraphobic Nosebleed has managed to capture generations of alienation, angst and anomie into one, concise 3" mini-CD. This is your life, and it's ending one minute at a time. What a fuckin' masterpiece.
Link:
http://www.digitalmetal.com/reviews.asp?cid=4089
Here's a review of their last full length, 'Frozen Corpse Stuffed with Dope'.
Bands like Agoraphobic Nosebleed make or break with me on their willingness and ability to inject a little flava into the whir. Listening to thirty-plus minutes of hypergurgle is no more innately interesting than listening to an electric fan. (I'm weirdly fascinated by the fact that we finally have bands whose music imitates the sounds of appliances; Dark Funeral sounds like a sewing machine, Krisiun sounds like a blender, Mortician sounds like a garbage disposal. Wonder what Chairman Mao would say?) Great grind-noise-whatever bands manage to impress a sense of personality, whether it's fun-lovin (Exit-13), goofy (Ghoul), or legitimately deranged (Pig Destroyer.) And AN does it too, with a worldview that contains greasy helpings of all three above-mentioned categories. Of course there are the odd slow-downs and break-ups, noise tracks, and samples; but that's forest-for-the-trees shit. What you really want to grok is the package as a whole. Like all great grind albums,
Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope is best experienced all at once, so that the total effect can swim on in. And the total effect here is a fucking waster, like being dosed with acid then locked in a Gravitron with your ex-girlfriend. The music is wildly disorienting and almost totally random; it's hard to believe the rhythm tracks are programmed. It just keeps diving and lurching at you in nuggets of drugged, oily misanthropy. In venom alone, this is like the stoned (therefore human, but no less evil) counterpart to December Wolves' brilliant
Blasterpiece Theatre, but AN seems to actually have an agenda that goes beyond annihilation. When they talk about dosing water towers and shooting busloads of rich kids, sure, it's a hoot, but it seems to cut a little deeper, they seem to be giving Charlie Manson an army of bionic she-devils instead of an army of runaway tards. The lyrics and the artwork all project a subtle, self-aware surrealism. The band this most reminds me of is Eyehategod (only in a
really big hurry) and it don't get sweeter'n that. I guess "vibe" is a goddamned ridiculous criteria to use in a review, but it really is the nutmaker here. I can't explain why AN have recorded such a slaughterhouse, and I can't explain why most other bands suck shit. (Unless they're French, in which case I believe I can.) But this album instantly has Agoraphobic Nosebleed keeping company with Pig Destroyer and Circle Of Dead Children. This album doesn't sound like an appliance, it sounds like a fucking gas chamber. Wonder what Chairman Charlie would say?
Link:
http://www.digitalmetal.com/reviews.asp?cid=3209
