Hog Meets Frog – HumANIMALization EP
Hog Meets Frog – HumANIMALization EP
Echotunes
Release Date: 24/02/23
Running Time: 21:42
Review by Dark Juan
8/10
With the music I am listening to currently, it appears I have been returned to the great days of the late 90’s – when Alt-Metal was vying with Grunge and Nu-Metal when one scene was dying out and the others were growing, but in the background there was one band who was ploughing their own peculiar, unique furrow which appeared to have fuck all to do with what was going on in the contemporary worlds of Rock and Metal. It was a band composed of a bass player with so much skill he put pretty much every lead guitarist in every band to shame, the guitarist from a Thrash Metal band and a drummer who seemingly had four arms and for whom 4/4 time signatures were alien concepts.
That band, of course, was Primus, and they are still going, and it appears that Austria have just let their version out of whatever benighted (and heavily secured) lab it was contained in. Please, allow Hog Meets Frog to introduce themselves:
“Hog Meets Frog play their music in honour of the holy spirit SQUEAUQACK. He created everything with just one fart and then fell into a deep sleep, on the edge of infinity. Maybe one day he will come back and – hand in hand with Kthulu (the misunderstood saviour), the flying spaghetti monster, and some characters of the HOG MEETS FROG family – make the world a place of love, peace, and joy. The EP is a non-conceptual concept record under the motto of the title: ‘humANIMALization’. And, as it happens, when the animal in the human awakens, then, for example, one turns into a bigot monkey and the other becomes an insecure piggy, one becomes a peeping control bear and the other becomes a greedy stock market bull. Just this behaviour – sometimes silly, monkey, or also clumsy, bearish – is told in the lyrics, as well as through the wide range of sound worlds and riffs. There it goes from the cheerful, funky ‘I’m about to pee’ slap sound to the broad, massive, ‘the world is so evil’ New Metal sound to fuzzy-bassy and distorted-guitary sound with a sip of kick-ass drums. You can call it progressive if you want or metal funky or whatever you want… in the end it’s nothing less than Hog Meets Frog’s SQUEAQUACK music!!”
Quite.
I am not sure Austria has ever released something so… so… outré ever. I mean their last big musical export was Ace Of fucking Base. This is avant-garde shit of the first order. It’s, although there will be inevitable comparisons with Primus, a record that is refreshingly different and funky compared to the po-facedness of lots of Metal and Extreme music at the moment – Hog Meets Frog has a serious social message dressed up in silliness and cartoonish characters – think “Animal Farm” set to Funk Metal and recorded by the artists from 2000 A.D. magazine (where the subject matter might be serious but you know there’s a Walter the Wobot peeking around the Hab-Block) and you’ll get an idea of what the band and I are trying to impress upon your understanding.
Musically – Primus is always going to be the primary influence because Funk bass and Metal amalgamated are only really done properly by them, although Hog Meets Frog leans as much toward the Metal as the Funk – the music is bouncy and frenetic and spasmodic and schizoid and everything somehow gels perfectly and the arrangements are just so. It’s an extraordinarily well executed set of songs, even if the casual listener (I have the lyric sheets in front of me and trust me, these Austrian madmen are OUT TO LUNCH in a big way, not since Arnocorps has there been anything quite so droolingly manic) will not understand a single fucking thing of what is going when the band are yowling about Unpigcorns and bears undertaking surveillance operations and dolphin teenagers coming to sticky ends and other fucking insane mentalness. I am not discussing individual songs with you all because a) have you SEEN the titles? b) it is a kind of concept EP and therefore has to be listened to in sequence, and c) I’m fundamentally lazy. Deal with it.
If you are a fan of the jerky, spiky, awkward sounds of Primus you’ll love this. I daresay if you enjoy a bit of early Red Hot Chili Peppers you may also dig this – certain parts of the record do have a sneak peek toward Frank Zappa and The Mothers Of Invention and The Crazy World Of Arthur Brown – not too obviously, but those sly, sideways little looks are there.
A major demerit is that this release is only a five track EP when the band surely must have an album’s worth of insanity in them. The production and mix of the record is superb, the bass being the lead instrument but not overshadowing the guitar work or the ridiculously complicated drumming and frankly Hog Meets Frog have won a bit of a fan in Dark Juan when this was a wild-card pick from the review list, with Dark Juan not knowing what kind of whirling juggernaut was coming his way. A roaring and brightly coloured one with an out-of-control calliope, blaring away with grinning idiots in animal masks wielding chainswords hanging off the sides of the bloody thing, it seems.
I need a lie down.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (Das patentierte Dark-Juan-Blutspritzer-Bewertungssystem – I love how even the gentlest thing in the world sounds like a declaration of war in German. Even though English is also a Germanic guttural…) awards Hog Meets Frog 8/10. Marks were deducted for a very similar sound to Primus and for only giving me an EP when I want an album. Dummkopfs!
TRACKLISTING:
01. Of Snakes ‘n’ Moles ‘n’ Bulls ‘n’ Dough
02. Peeping-Bear’s Exegesis of Not Peeping
03. Apes Don’t Smoke Cigars – Just Pipes
04. Stuff(ed), Cage(d) & Enslave(d)
05. ZIGGY The Unpigcorn
LINE-UP:
EP Band Lineup:
Ivo Matuš – Drums
Christoph ‘fizl’ Hehn – Drums
ARIYAN Rezaei Jahromi – Guitar
Peter ’PETZ‘ Schwabl – Bass, Storytelling
Live Band Lineup:
Christoph ‘fizl’ Hehn – Drums
ARIYAN Rezaei Jahromi – Guitar
Peter ‘PETZ‘ Schwabl – Bass, Storytelling
LINKS:
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