Lumberghast – First Person Shooter
Lumberghast – First Person Shooter
Self-Released
Release Date: 01/05/23
Running Time: 19:32
Review by Dark Juan
9/10
Greetings and salutations, my dear friends of all genders. I am Dark Juan and I bring this nonsense to you from a town near Halifax that is currently basking in the glow of the yellow dwarf star that has deigned to poke its head above the parapet for the first time this year and therefore the entire population including babes in arms have decided to hit the hostelries. I of course am staying the fuck out of the way indoors because crowds of people antagonise me and the sick desire to murder each and every single last fucking one of them is growing stronger. I have locked myself away although I am contemplating a swift visit to B&M up the road because they have those litre cans of Faxe lager there and then I can blot out the building savagery with alcohol. Also I need to buy some clothes pegs. So, here we are. Perhaps I will put a record on and make some use of myself.
The Platter of Splatter™ has been called into action to spin another disc of doom upon it. Today I have elected to have Lumberghast pass under my keenly informed sense of review. Perhaps it will jerk me out of the shitty mood I am in. Or perhaps it might be the catalyst for me to go and get the sledgehammer from the yard and go round to the pub round the corner and indulge myself in a bit of blood spraying blunt force trauma with all the happy people outside…
Let’s get one thing straight right from the get go – Lumberghast describes his music as Dark Synthwave/Industrial Electronic. You can forget about the Synthwave bit. The music is much more Industrial – indeed, it reminds this experienced Electrohead of the glory days of early EBM and Aggrotech – it references the likes of early Psyclon Nine, Unter Null, Suicide Commando and early, early Combichrist – all squelches and buzzing and howling and punishing Industrial tempos with bits of Skinny Puppy and Front Line Assembly welded haphazardly on to it. This is also melded with lots of distorted guitar and a really snotty Punk attitude. The music is a snarling, snappish thing – opening cut ‘Hello Decimator’ kicks off the record with backward-masked jabbering that morphs into what sounds like George W. Bush spouting nonsense before the rhythm kicks in and it is time to fucking DANCE! All the cybergoths will be loving this record because they can bounce to it. Quite like how young cybergoth girls bounce without exploding (in a charming and eye-catching fashion) out of the corsetry they normally wear is astounding. So are their shoes.
‘Splatterhouse’ is very reminiscent of embryonic Combichrist having been mated with God Module. With the buzzsaw guitar going as well, there’s a kind of odd Rob Zombie vibe going on as well as the heavy Combichrist worship. I don’t know whether its intentional homage or hoping no-one will notice but ‘Arcade Bloodbath’ has the same (but heavily distorted) bass line as the central melody from the White Stripes’ ‘Seven Nation Army’ until the key change and the Power Electronics kick in, which are rather reminiscent of a lighter Whitehouse on this tune. A new influence appears on ‘Kaizu Headache Flowers’ and that influence is Aphex Twin and his hardcore Drum and Bass with added guitar madness. In fact, I would go as far as to say that the EBM and Aggrotech influences are tempered with Drum and Bass quite heavily on the later tracks on the album – ‘665’ also being heavily D n’ B flavoured. Now, the casual Extreme music listener might not be aware of the heaviness of proper hardcore Drum and Bass – done right it rivals the power of Industrial Metal and it’s a relentless brainhammer of percussion and blastwaves. It does not do to malign Extreme music that isn’t Metal. You do yourselves out of some serious musical enjoyment if you do.
‘Go Team Girth’ (which is what Mrs Dark Juan chants when Dark Juan returns to the house after work) returns us to more Metallic territory with heavily distorted, bandsaw-like guitars as the central instrument but with a middle part and ending of the song sounding like a bit of Master Boot Record crossed with Throbbing Gristle. ‘Nero’ for some reason reminds me a bit of Fear Factory at the start of the song with super-chonky guitars and a tempo that is pretty much the same as ‘Zero Signal’…
It is a slickly produced beast, this album. The guitar and the electronics work well together and everything is meatier than a butcher’s offal bin and there’s more bottom end than the keel of the Battleship Yamato when your mum is on board. It’s lush, and greasy and metallic, like the machine that is Lumberghast has been greased with the fat of the dead. The stench of rendered-down people permeating the air around it combined with the ozone smell of frying electronics and the tang of tortured steel grinding against other metal as arm-mounted storm bolters spin up to attack speed before unleashing a hail of mass reactive explosive shells against an armoured meatbag trying to outflank it…
Yes, Lumberghast’s music has provoked my imagination and this is never a good thing. Now my mind is a riot of blood-soaked men screaming through welded mesh surgically implanted over their mouths having limbs torn off and replaced by whirring, mechanical augmetics cycling through endless forms of edged weapons in a nightmarish operating theatre plated in rusting, blood-streaked steel in a subterranean hellhole.
Thanks a fucking bunch, Lumberghast. Just for once I would like to be able to bend my imagination to beautiful thoughts like meadows overlooking the sea and gambolling creatures doing delightful things. Instead I have images of people being torn in half and their nervous systems being used to power biomechanical murderous horrors, covered in blood and hydraulic fluid, where terrified human eyes stare out of targeting lenses and explosive detonations reduce other men to lumps of charred flesh.
I need a lie down but now I am afraid to sleep.
The Patented Dark Juan Blood Splat Rating System (No translation as this aural horror is British, and also going to start WRESTLING, of all things) awards Lumberghast 9/10 for an album that has lit up all the sadly neglected pleasure spots in Dark Juan’s slightly askew brain. A mark was deducted because he mentioned Synthwave in his blurb and there was very little of it and Dark Juan is a rabid enthusiast of that style of music. Also, 8 tracks in just short of 20 minutes is NOWHERE NEAR ENOUGH SAVAGERY! Still, Lumberghast is fucking brilliant if you like electronic madness hammered into Metal guitars and punishing tempos. Dark Juan does.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Hello Decimator
02. Splatterhouse
03. Arcade Bloodbath
04. Kaizu Headache Flowers
05. 665
06. Slap Cannon
07. Go Team Girth
08. Nero
LINE-UP:
Otto Von Lumberghast – The whole unholy nightmare.
LINKS:
This is all I could find of the online presence of this very strange beast. I did look, I promise, Simon and Beth. No, not the Taser again! I’ve been good! I tried to follow the template and everything. I’m not going into the room where there is no darkness again! (I found the bandcamp! Into the flogging room you go Mr Juan. Assume the position! – Beth)
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.