Sporus - Fruit Machine

 Released: July 26

I started out listening to this album completely blind, with no idea of what to really really expect. Going from that angle, the first track kind of tricked me with is steady driving rhythm and cacophonous start. It had this almost tribal feel to it, being almost entirely percussion save for some scraping guitar sounds floating around  providing some noisy feedback to fill things out. As it slowly crawled towards its end and the next track began, I thought I was about to get some more of the same or similar. Instead, it breaks out into heavy riffs that reminded me of the early eras of trash and hardcore with those sweet sweet D-beats on the drums. But the vocals are what did it for me, just due to their intensely unhinged quality. It goes from guttural glowing and trashing about to something so throughout weird in all the best ways. Hard to explain exactly but it almost like wild banshee screaming that's so overly theatrical that it immediately caught my ear and didn't let go.   

This vocal technique is most on display on "Might Is Right" where it does a call and response thing at times but also layers on top on the guttural vocals at other times. But it's also all over most of the rest of the album too. It overrides just about everything else when you hear it too, giving the whole song a deranged quality. Not to take away from any of the other elements, the guitars here have a pretty spot on tone the whole way through and Sporus is all about a randomly placed guitar solo too that adds to the manic energy. They also show a neat penchant for using weird noise and vocal samples that show up at the end of the tracks, a favorite of mine being the random informational about knife-wielding mentally-ill persons. 

It's all very tongue-in-cheek in it's content but dead serious in its delivery. There's a tension between these two approaches that makes for an album that's highly entertaining, a little bit scary, and way more fun to listening to than it should be.