(DGR fires off the following review of the latest discharge from the Scottish band Party Cannon, which is out now on the Unique Leader label.)
The thing to keep in mind when listening to Party Cannon and their newest release Injuries Are Inevitable is that it is a supremely stupid collection of music. This has been the band’s M.O for the course of their career; the logo proclaims it, the album art proclaims it, and their album titles and song titltes spell it out for those of us denser than the band.
Granted, proclaiming yourself as being massively moronic does not make yourself critic-proof and portraying your music as being the cranial equivalent of an empty, infinite void doesn’t excuse endless braindead riffage – but it does soften the blow quite a bit.
You know upon entrance that Party Cannon‘s music will not be a high-minded exercise in philosophy. It is not something you’ll be sitting down to with a nice glass of sipping whiskey and a pipe full of fine tobacco and ‘appreciating’. Unless, your idea of this exercise involves putting all those things in a bowl, smashing it with a rock, and eating the shards and splinters.
Injuries Are Inevitable is an exercise in ‘dumb’ and just the group’s latest exploration in how far they can push that particular label without morphing into something completely different.
Party Cannon are, of course, a name around these here parts – as much a source of amusement as enjoyment. They’ve experienced their brush with ‘fame’ courtesy of a few tour posters but they’ve also basically been the source of the occasional chuckle when they manage to put out a song or two that is surprisingly technical as much as it is a style of slam song reveling in its own stupidity.
Party Cannon have spent a good chunk of their career vacillating between the two, which may be why there are some decent-sized gaps in full-length releases, whereas many other bands could just recycle the gravel pit churning sound and call it good, setting album releases so on schedule that train systems in other countries would be jealous.
That doesn’t place Party Cannon at the forefront of a genre, as their particular style of metal’s increasingly weighty and suffocatingly heavy tree doesn’t really require one. You could pick four to five bands and have the general lion’s share of what’s happening within the bounds of their style with little need to dive further. What is appreciating from the band though, is that for all the talk of sheer dumbfuckery that they love to get up to, you’ll get the occasionally brutal moment that causes you to headbang beyond the bog-standard ‘sick, bro’ reaction or something where you even have to acknowledge that it does take some talent to play. In the same way that many death metal bands sound like backed-up sewer lines on the verge of exploding in all directions, yet you watch what they’re playing and you realize the sheer scale of fretwork involved. You wind up at the weird crossroads of brain-dead and brilliant; you could even place them on a circle and watch a band do laps around them.
The second song on Injuries Are Inevitable – “Test The Chute” – for instance is over five minutes long and could rank up there with some of the stage-wrecking stuff groups like Devangelic get up to on the regular. They do this sort of act twice within the bounds of Injuries Are Inevitable as well, firing up that particular jet-fueled monster for “Bonus Ambulance” closer to the end of the album, another five and a half minute house-wrecker of a song.
“Safety Is Not Priority” is the weightier track within this mud-caked tomb, leaping over six minutes with reckless abandon and actually serves as musical ‘codex Party Cannon‘ in a weird way. If you want a guide to the band as whole, that may actually be the song for you since it rumbles through their whole musical book in that span of time. High-low interchanging vocals? You betcha, all over that song like flies on pig shit. The brawniest and dumbest mid-section you can find? That’s your song.
On the other side of the spectrum you’ll have a track like “1983”, which is basically a minute-long feedback loop with a wall of drumming behind it, barely justifying its own existence before “Cannonball Loop” beats their listeners into a pulp via seriously gross-sounding bass guitar.
Party Cannon more often operate a mode befitting the two and a half to three and a half minute jam on Injuries Are Inevitable. Even they realize that a densely packed song can quickly cross over from being overwhelming into pointless noise, so there is just the tiniest bit of restraint involved in the slop-throwing that they revel in here. The same can’t be said for the corner-store comedian song titles but the band do stick fairly close to their theme and they do have a brand to maintain. Actually naming the songs with something a brutal death band would be more prone to would be something normal people do, and this is one of those bands that is just as much meme as oppositional defiant disorder made into a musical act.
That does drill down to the core of things on Injuries Are Inevitable, though. This is music that serves a purpose and for the most part that purpose is to behave like an absolute idiot. Party Cannon are having fun with it and the crowd is expected to as well, especially since it is written in the most easily translatable and understandable forms of their style that they can make it. They could do the entire album for someone who’s never heard it before and if you have some familiarity with the amorphous and gross boundaries between death metal’s various subgenres, you’d do alright hanging in there with even a polite headbang. It’s meant to be fun without an overeliance on shock value or falling into the ‘oh no they didn’t’ trap.
Injuries Are Inevitable likely won’t be a lasting testament to the arts and humanities but the nature of an album like this and the music scene it arises from is one worthy of discussion. It’s the latest example of extremely talented musicians making music that is equal parts impressively complex and insanely stupid, taking the inherent artistic value out of it almost as a challenge of ‘no you tell us why you enjoy this’ while also making it clear that you won’t be hammering this shit out without a bit of practice beforehand.
We’ve amused ourselves with Party Cannon for some time now and they’re still going strong here, so at the very least we can continue our streak of ‘outside looking in’ bemusement while all of you kids have your fun with the bright colors and bad acid trip album artwork.
https://uniqueleaderrecords.bandcamp.com/album/injuries-are-inevitable
https://www.facebook.com/PartyCannonUK