Monday, August 16, 2010

Demo-lition Derby: The Oily Menace

The Oily Menace
Modulistic Terror
Wow, I’m gonna sound like the old ass fart that I am, but have we actually reached the point where fucking cassettes have a retro chic? (Ahh, memories of rewinding Sepultura albums with a pencil in chemistry class.) But there it was in my mailbox, a toxic green spool of tape courtesy of Michigan’s The Oily Menace, who dropped the cash for a custom cassette treatment for their Slayer-referencing demo (like I wouldn’t notice that, kids).
The oleaginous punks mix power violence loom and gloom and with Capitalist Casualties-style blast fests. While it ably soothes ’90s nostalgia, The Oily Menace are not an amber trapped tribute to a bygone era. The vocals are also more of a grindcore gargle than your typical hardcore bark, mixing in a modern element to update the sound.
And oh what a sound: winding guitar ratchets around broken blasts and whipcrack cymbal smacks. “Antibiotic Markers” corkscrews and thrashes, striking out like a wounded cobra. The classic hardcore sound of “Scion and Vice” gets updated with modern growled vocals while “Stepping into Daylight” is sub-blast cacophony.
It’s all been done before and The Oily Menace have yet to distill that certain something that will set them apart from the retro-blast hordes, but it’s good enough to make me wish I had a yellow Sony Walkman cassette player (which my parents cruelly refused to buy me) so I could jam to this on the bus ride to school. For those of you with more modern sensibilities, download it here.

6 comments:

Alex Layzell said...

I was expecting this to have BP references all over it, and after downloading it I agree that it lacks a certain depth which will make it stand out of the crowd.

Andrew Childers said...

seemed to obvious. even for me. but feel free to provide your own BP related commentary.

Wooderson said...

I never had the yellow Sony walkman either but my parents did buy me something similar to this (http://craphound.com/images/_45984522_walkman_226_300.gif). Since Sony was big bucks they bought me a Citizen instead that had a really sensitive auto-reverse where if you even breathed on it the thing would flip the tape on you. I think this is why I still dislike cassettes to this day.

Bill Willingham IV, Esquire said...

I don't have a method of playing cassettes other than my car stereo, so I never buy them.

I checked out the download, however. Promising, but nothing terribly original. Let's see if they get up to something interesting!

@ Wooderson: I demand to know if you're the Wooderson from GD! This is LJ, just in case.

PatrickDM said...

let's fucking go!...demo lags to me.

Wooderson said...

@ Will: Well..since you demanded, yup it's me!