Total Fucking Destruction
Peace, Love, And Total Fucking Destruction
6.3
Generally speaking, the biggest problem with discussing grindcore albums is not that there’s nothing to say, but rather that there’s nothing distinctive to say. Sure, there are plenty of platitudes available to convey the whole “short, fast, loud, politi-pissed” schtick, but soak them up often enough and every grind album will start to sound the same—both on the page and in your ears. Fortunately, Philly’s Total Fucking Destruction don’t suffer from that problem, at least on the conceptual level. Instead of the usual America-is-a-dystopia political yammerings, Ex-Brutal Truth vet Rich Hoak uses this oddball act as a sounding board for his bizarre social satire, flocking it with snarky pop culture allusions and self-reference. Peace, Love and Total Fucking Destruction in particular is pretty hefty on the ideological dimension; to hear Hoak tell it, we’ve got a concept album on our hands…and a fairly interesting concept it is, too, though Hoak’s lack of lyrical focus and the band’s not-always-so-inventive songwriting can’t always carry it to fruition.
Peace, Love and Total Fucking Destruction tells the story of a child soldier celebrating as the history of the human race staggers to its conclusion. Unlike your run-of-the-mill apocalyptic tale, this disc offers a model of the endtimes in which civilization collapses with a depleted-resource whimper instead of a nuclear bang. Well, that’s what the album’s about in theory, at any rate. Very few of Peace…’s tracks explicitly reference the story it purports to tell; instead, these songs are a mishmash of sneering mockery, inane babble, and the inevitable grind songs that are about grind. Sometimes Hoak’s lyrics are quite cutting, especially when he uses his soapbox to skewer faux-revolutionary pop culture (“The revolution will not be televised because the revolution will not be,” he scoffs on “Doublespeaker”). Just as often, though, TFD’s lyrical dimension boils down to simple repetition of song titles (“Nihilism, Emptiness, Nothingness, and Nonsense,” “Monsterearth Megawar,” “Antidecompartmentilization,” etc.), which quickly gets annoying thanks to Hoak’s party-thrash delivery. It just seems a bit disingenuous to make claims about unifying lyrical narratives and then end up shouting “fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck the internet!” instead.
Of course, Peace… is a grind album first and foremost and a work of satire maybe fifthmost or sixthmost. TFD’s tuneage takes center stage here, and it’s more, well, tune-y than a lot of grind at the very least. As you’d expect from any band featuring an ex-Brutal Truth member, this shit falls easily into the ‘quirky’ sector of grindcore, though like the band’s lyrics, it’s rarely quite as strange as TFD’s aesthetic suggests. Sure, there are occasional wacky structures and noisy freakouts—7-minute closer “Last Night I Dreamed We Destroyed the World” comes to mind—and occasionally guitarist Paul Herzog will break out a weirdly bright and melodic riff that sounds like a grindcore take on Minutemen (“Non-Existence of the Self,” “Grindcore Salesmen”). Otherwise, though, much of Peace… is competently played, listenable but straightforward grind that falls somewhere between Birdflesh and some of Leng T’che’s older, sillier albums. Enjoyable, yes, but hardly exciting.
I would be lying if I didn’t admit to being a bit disappointed by Peace, Love and Total Fucking Destruction. Though this is a solid grind album, it delivers neither the immersive lyrical world it flirts with nor all-out weirdness it hints at with the fullness I’d like. Even so, TFD are novel enough that I find myself wanting to like them, and my guess is that most grind fans will feel the same way—just don’t expect any Pig Destroyer-style conceptual epics out of them.
Related
Total Fucking DestructionHater
2/15/2011