The Wild Side pays me $.04 a word, modifiers and adjectives all, and my job is to get through a fair 600 word length. They also provide me with heretofore unheard marketing challenges, albums with which A&R people haven’t the foggiest of what to do with, so they hope that some journalist shall reason through the waste, and sell it for them. And precariously, we critics have to decide whether we have a soul or whether we should expose half the pap that proliferates the music industry. The thought of tearing the guts out of some tangent piece of art is (I’m not kidding) sometimes too much to weigh on some critics’ heads. Every editor in the world settles this confusion with reason: “Be objective and fair.” I’ve listened to Duke Lion Fights the Terror!! five times, and I’ve come to the conclusion fuck fair. Music like Big dumb Face’s is so much a humorless and joyless and cruel and decadent and juvenile and devoid and labored and Neanderthal-like and abysmal assault onto my ears, that to go through a sixth listen could only be classified as masochism. That is not fair. We force ourselves onto art; it doesn’t force itself onto us. And so, with that in mind, I’m going to subject you to the diary of my sixth and final listen of Duke Lion Fights the Terror!! Big dumb Face, where ever you are, I hope you enjoy the abject misery, you remorseless, shameless, and  talentless sadists.

“Burgalveist,” the first song on Duke Lion, starts with the faux-Faustian distorted deep muted fart vocal—the type of sound that would obviously make Gwar proud—where Wes Borland, guitarist of the seminal band Limp Bizkit (seminal not in musical achievement, but seminal in the inexplicable and encompassing authority with which Bizkit holds of the masses’ tastes, to a point where it can only be assumed that subliminal techniques are being bombarded by a nefariously propagandist government) pounds out a machine gun bass drum rhythm; obviously the novelty of the double-bass has swayed Borland, who does all the musical instruments on Duke Lion!, but somehow is amazed enough to ignore how redundant the metal music he derives from is; someone wrote that Duke Lion shows Borland’s infinite influence from the humorous laments of Ween, but if a 3-year-old was crudely etching onto his bedroom wall a crayon mural dedicated to the Mozart symphony his under-developed brain had heard earlier, and he started eating the crayons and regurgitated all over the mural for some artistic flourish, I am not going supply platitudes for failed inspiration—

I’m sorry, but fucking “Limp Bizkit side-project”?!

(441 words! Only a few more to go!)

—and while we’re on the subject of juvenileness, every thick and laughably “aggressive” song is interlaced with crudely crafted “satirical” songs: “Duke Lion,” “Kali is the Sweethog,” “Space Adventure,” “Mighty Penis Laser,” “Voices in the Wall”: all of these tracks are reminiscent of the percussions of a Casio keyboard, tone instruments that evoke clueless little kid introductory improvisations, and the vocals—which either seem like a tired Mark Mothersbaugh or any given dull vocalist on helium—are so inept,  childish, and labored in their attempt to seem goofy, that it almost masks the insipid obtuseness of the songs’ subject matters, which are—(get this)—mock characters; from the searing redneck indictment “Fightin’ Stance” (“Wearing boots without socks/Whoppin’ ass/Knuckles brass”), to the title character Duke Lion (“His golden sword can shoot out balls of fire/his special armor makes him never tire”)—AW, GODDAMN, WHAT THE HELL IS THIS SUPPOSED TO BE ABOUT!?  WHAT THE HELL JOY DOES ANYONE GET IN LISTENING TO THIS—OR WORSE—MAKING IT!? HOW FAR HAS A MUSICIAN SUNK INTO INEPTNESS THAT WHENEVER THEY MAKE ANY MUSIC, IT WILL ALWAYS SOUND PRETENTIOUS!?

And 634 words. There. Review done. Now I never have to listen to this infested piece of shit ever again.