Gomad! And Monster – Sickness EP
Gomad! And Monster – Sickness EP
Eclipse Records
Release Date: 26/04/24
Running Time: 16:29
Review by Dark Juan
8/10
Greetings, my chums from around the world. I am Dark Juan, and I am not a very nice person at the moment. I am bad tempered, cranky, irascible, and generally horrible to be around. This is mainly due to having been unwell for several months and while doing this, having a paid work schedule that is somewhat punishing. In the past month for example, I have worked three 72-hour weeks and I have a 96-hour week this week before I finally go on leave for a bit. Don’t get a job in kid’s homes if you are afraid of work… It is because of this I must apologise to you all out there for my lack of scribing over the past few weeks. Even Dark Juan must sleep sometime… I haven’t even been drinking or wenching!
Now, I have found a brief window of not having to do other things, therefore Dark Juan has elected to festoon the estimable Platter of Splatter™ with rope lights, LEDs, lasers and much shiny black PVC in order to play the latest EP from Spain’s Gomad! and Monster, whose Electronic Rock stylings Dark Juan has not come across (fnarr fnarr!) before, this four-track EP “Sickness” being the third part of a quadrilogy representing the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.
Let us be clear right away. If you are a Metal traditionalist you might as well give up reading this review now and go and listen to Saxon and Judas Priest’s latest albums (both of which are very good, if not vintage) because there is not much you will find to your advantage with Gomad! and Monster. However, if you are a lover of the unusual and an intrepid listener, please read on.
Gomad! and Monster owes as much to rave culture, Evanescence, KMFDM and <PIG> (although the four masked gentlemen who are Gomad! and Monster as by no means as sexy as Lucia Cifarelli or indeed the Lord Of Lard Raymond Watts) as much as it does to early, electronic Ministry or the likes of Suicide Commando or King Satan, being all polished, shiny, black PVC, fucking colossal black boots and Torture Garden aesthetics and massive, MASSIVE whips. Kinky cybergoffs are gonna fucking love it to abuse their partners to. Chuck in some seriously sexy techno sounds and I have just realized that Gomad! and Monster sound like the consummately brilliant and deeply lamented British Techno Metal band Cubanate, but with a rather less po-faced attitude towards the music and also lacking the underlying homoerotic element of Marc Heal in an Indian Motorcycles biker jacket and tight black jeans and shiny biker boots singing songs like ‘Black n’ Blue’…
The opening song is called ‘Ravearchy’, and it is an intricately layered beast, with much thought having gone into the arrangement of the song underneath the bonks and squelches of the outer levels of the music, and to the ear of Dark Juan the song reminds him of the likes of The Orb and Orbital being forced to mate with Cubanate and any number of Nu-Metal bands.
Wait a fucking minute.
Do you all remember ‘Propane Nightmares’ by a band called Pendulum way back when in 2008? THAT is exactly what Gomad! and Monster sound like on ‘Ravearchy’, right down to a massive Techno motif that runs throughout the song and makes even this poor old, knackered fucker want to dance. It’s absolutely an amalgam of Dance music, Electronic Rock, and Techno with a bit of Metal guitar in there as well.
‘Stillborn’ is an amalgam of I: Scintilla (do you remember the utterly GLORIOUS Brittany Bindrim? Dark Juan does. This might not be a Very Good Thing as far as she is concerned ), hardcore gang-style backing vocals and Marilyn Manson electronics and guitar. It sounds like a more Electronic and less Industrial Nitzer Ebb with a chorus that young Goth girls are going to lose their shit about, being as it is Emo as fuck. To prove my point, allow me to copy the lyrics of the chorus for you;
“Deal with it! Forego!
Thorned roses grow
Call Upon the Storm!
´till the day comes
Give in to give up!
Swallow your hope
Deal with it! It’s done!
Stillborn longing…”
Davey Havok would have been proud of that one.
‘You Must Be Ours’ is what happens when you let Combichrist produce a Dance tune. It is heavy, power Electronics, slammed into the most Techno beats and the kind of laser-accompanied, overwhelming Dance music only found at massive raves in the arse-end of the French countryside, miles from anywhere, but amplified to Manowar levels of silliness, although pleasingly, Gomad! and Monster have nothing to do with loincloths, swords and being so unknowingly homoerotic it hurts to look at. Gomad! and Monster have a kind of UK teen gang aesthetic with skull masks, all black clothes, and North Face snapback hats. However, I have once more digressed. ‘You Must Be Ours’ is a powerhouse of a tune and if you like Combichrist and KMFDM at the same time you could do a lot worse than have a chukka at this song.
The final offering on this four-track EP is an instrumental piece, ‘Blue Label Boring Machine’, which is four minutes of Gomad! and Monster trying to reduce your brain to chunky salsa via the means of guitar and some of the most visceral electronics I have heard from a band who are so highly and carefully produced. They coruscate and slice and pummel and tenderise and scrape and carve, and the piece even has one of those silly breakdowns where they speed the drums up so that all the people whacked out on Ecstasy and MDMA can have a proper bounce about while gurning maniacally at the short-skirted girl next to them who they are hoping to trap off with. I’ll give you a clue, they are going to fail. No self-respecting attractive young lady is going to want to bump uglies with someone who looks like they are wearing Worzel Gummidge’s handsome face because of the drugs they have slammed down their gullet. It is very reminiscent of a combination of Cubanate, Pendulum and C-Tec (a side project of Front 242’s Jean-Luc De Meyer and Cubanate’s Marc Heal) with its insistent tempo, extreme danceability and all-round likeability…
…And that is what’s appealing about Gomad! and Monster. They are a likable band. I like their music, I like their schtick and aesthetic and I like their combination of sounds to create something that is very much to Dark Juan’s taste, even if Metal cardigans are going to despise it.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (el sistema patentado de clasificación de salpicaduras de sangre de Dark Juan: ¡Hola a mis nuevos amigos españoles! Espero que mi gramática sea correcta aquí porque no tengo ni puta idea y he aprendido tu idioma por mi cuenta. ¡No dudes en escribirme y decirme qué inglés tan ignorante soy!) has carefully considered the score for Gomad! and Monster and awards the EP 8/10 – marks deducted for it simply not being long enough for Dark Juan’s satisfaction, and because the music is likely to find a limited audience due to it having as much to owe to mainstream Dance music as it does to Hardcore Techno and Metal. I have spoken! And I haven’t mentioned Trap Metal once! Go me!
TRACKLISTING:
01. Ravearchy
02. Stillborn
03. You Must Be Ours
04. Blue Label Boring Machine
LINE-UP:
Sebastian Shinobi – Lead vocals,
Doc Inari – Guitar, backing vocals
Ivy – Drums, backing vocals
Alex Tena – DJ, synths
LINKS:
Disclaimer: This review is solely the property of Dark Juan and Ever Metal. It is strictly forbidden to copy any part of this review, unless you have the strict permission of both parties. Failure to adhere to this will be treated as plagiarism and will be reported to the relevant authorities.
