May 162024
 

(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. Continue reading »

Mar 282024
 

Lately I’ve been organizing these roundups of recommended new songs and videos in alphabetical order by band name, because that means I don’t have to spend any time thinking like a DJ, trying to figure out what makes sense in the flow of the music. Sometimes that has coincidentally led to interesting juxtapositions.

Today, however, I’ve chosen a different organizational scheme, because some of the songs naturally paired up with each other. So this collection includes a block of goofy stuff, a “hulking and hideous  death metal” block, a Seattle block, and some curveballs at the end, although the very end is more like a sequence of eephus pitches that sail in high and slow (look it up).

But to begin, you’ll find something that doesn’t fit anywhere else but left me wide-eyed and slack-jawed. Continue reading »

Jul 062017
 

 

Perhaps you remember the Scottish band Party Cannon from our premiere of a song exactly one month ago. They sometimes spell their name PaRtY-CaNnOn. Their logo looks like something you might find on a child’s lunch box. They refer to their music as “Party Slam”. And the name of their new EP is Perverse Party Platter (it will be released tomorrow — July 7th — by Gore House Productions).

If you listened to our premiere of “Keg Crusher“, you know that all of this is a bit of a misdirection. As I wrote then, that song is a “seriously ruinous piece of mayhem, a blast of death/grind and slam that’s hard and heavy enough to cause blunt force trauma and viciously destructive enough to leave the rooms in your mind lying in a smoking rubble.” “I mean, sure, it’s a lot of fun, too, but the kind of fun cats have playing with mice before biting down on their skulls and devouring their brains.” Continue reading »

Jun 062017
 

 

You would be forgiven if you’ve already got the wrong idea in your head about this song we’re about to premiere. I’ve already forgiven myself after I got faked out. I mean, look at the evidence:

The band is named Party Cannon, sometimes spelled PaRtY-CaNnOn. Their logo looks like something you might find on a child’s lunch box. The name of the song we’re premiering is “Keg Crusher“. And it comes from an EP named Perverse Party Platter (which will be released on July 7th by Gore House Productions). Also, the band refer to their music as “Party Slam“. Plus, there’s this comment by the band’s bassist Chris Ryan:

“While some bands in our genre take a more ‘mature’ route in later releases, we have definitely not.”

On the strength of such evidence, one might deduce that these Scots are a big joke, even before seeing this photo: Continue reading »