Acumen Nation
Anticore
5.4
About seven years ago, there was a temporary city-wide creative exhibit here in Chicago where various artists used whatever medium they wanted to decorate a life sized model cow. This has been done in various other ways all over the place, I know. But I still remember one specific cow located past downtown, closer to the industrial district, ironically. This thing looked like gay pride parade directed by Faster Pussycat wired out on crack had collided with it at brain-numbing speed. Take that for what you will, but that’s also what my hometown’s Acumen Nation’s latest in a long slew of releases, Anticore, reminds me of.
This is some goofy shit. I suppose you can call it industrial metal of some sort, it would be easier to figure it out if I weren’t so busy laughing over it. After doing some research on the band, there’s supposed to be some sort of underlying twisted humor being applied to much of Acumen Nation’s material, which explains a lot. I still don’t get Zao or The Dillinger Escape Plan comparisons at all though, as stated by various band media. Now you have to understand this isn’t humorous like they wanted you to laugh through the whole damn thing, I just found myself laughing at how ridiculous some of it sounded.
With vocals that occasionally sound like the singer is trying to detach a snapping turtle from his scrotum, the band plows through no less than 15 tracks of bouncy, jovial, spitting glam-ish industrial metal with more pomp and swagger than the band has any business dishing out for playing at such a terribly old style of music. It doesn’t sound funny after the third listen, however, it sounds childlike, and a little creepy in a bad way. It makes me feel like I’m listening to an Ugly Kid Joe tape that’s in the process of getting eaten in the player. To be fair, however, I’m not offended by any of this album.
The lyrics are hilariously bad, the band throws in tons of techno, hip-hop, and occasional thrash beats, and there’s rapid-fire riffing and electronic sound effects everywhere. The more regulation vocals are raspy, high-pitched and somewhat half whined like Billy Corgan in parts. There are moments of promise here and there, but the band seems bound and determined to shoot itself in the foot as soon as a cool vocal arrangement or neat little riff actually does happen to come along, usually by adding unnecessary digital enhancement, a worn out electro beat, or an unintentionally funny lyric.
Anticore sounds like shock rock Hollywood metal, updated, with a mechanical sort of punkish nu-metal (whatever) twist. I’m sure their thousands of MySpace friends will eat this album up since it does have a very lively quality about it. I’ll never listen to it again after this review hits the mainpage, but for playing such a crap kind of metal, Acumen Nation do have some sort of odd charm. The effect doesn’t last long, however, and soon I was regaining my senses and shaking off the residue of this tongue-in-cheek disc. I can see this going over well with their online devotees and MTV kids, but for the regular readers of this site who don’t just pop in to defend their favorite band against ‘bashing’, get that pillow ready for naptime. Or maybe you’ll be a new fan, but for me, this is like a joke I only want to hear once in a lifetime. I’ll leave it at that and move on for now.
