Album Review: GWAR - 'Battle Maximus'

4 October 2013 | 12:02 pm | Staff Writer
Originally Appeared In

Boring and stupid.

More Gwar More Gwar

If you have heard of GWAR then you know that they are not a serious band. At all. Musically it's all on the up and up - with everything professionally executed. However, the rest is simply elaborate. Too much so. The band’s lyrics focus on themselves being some kind of alien species that want to hurt mankind and they undertake space and time travel. There’s this guy named Mr Perfect who wants to destroy mankind for good and he is there enemy. Yeah, if you can follow it you’re clearly a fan. 
 

The band’s latest effort, ‘Battle Maximus’ is one of the most interesting yet boring metal albums of the year. The introduction is quirky and funny, introducing the story (which probably won’t make a lot of sense) and sounds a lot like Tenacious D! Then you’ll get to ‘Madness At The Core Of Time’ and that’s when the album bleeds into one long song that sounds the same. Grab some core-beats for the drums, riffs for the guitar and bass, with a solo at roughly the two or three-minute mark and you’ll have yourself just about every track on ‘Battle Maximus’. Don’t forget the purposely-poor vocals with lyrics about death, fighting, gore and shamefully, rape.
 

Every song feels the exact same on this album with a few exceptions. There’s no variation or experimentation and yes, this whole band is a satire, but you’d at least expect them to make it appealing. This full-length has no appeal because every song sounds like it was put together in an hour and then just left as is. The exceptions are ‘Mr Perfect’ and ‘Falling’. The former is different as it starts off with a slow but sweeping guitar solo for about a minute and ‘Falling’ is a slower, more stripped back song as opposed to the rest. Yet it still drags on at a painfully slow pace for too long.
 

It wouldn’t be a review of GWAR if we didn’t talk about the lyrics. They’re pathetic. The themes, as said before, involve such topics as killing, fighting aliens, death, necrophilia and rape. The band is clearly a joke but rape is nothing to joke about. Ever! ‘Raped At Birth’ is disgraceful with lyrics such as, “When I was a boy/My life was destroyed/I was raped at birth/I was not overjoyed”. The album features such lyrics throughout and although some are funny, it doesn’t change the fact that the sound of 'Battle Maximus' is boring and repetitive.

All in all, this album is straight up dull. The songs are these cheap and easy tracks that become mind-numbingly tedious after time. The lyrics are absolute rubbish and they become so stupid they stop being funny after the third song. If your band is satirical and meant to be taken as a joke, at least take the musicianship seriously because at the end of the day, this is music and it needs to be aesthetically pleasing. 'Battle Maximus' is not aesthetically pleasing.  

 

1. Intro
2. Madness at the Core of Time
3. Bloodbath
4. Nothing Left Alive
5. They Swallowed the Sun
6. Torture
7. Raped at Birth 
8. I, Bonesnapper
9. Mr. Perfect
10. Battle Maximus
11. Triumph of the Pig Children
12. Falling 
13. Fly Now

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