ALBUM REVIEW: Sickness In The North – Birdflesh

Cult grindcore trio BIRDFLESH have been around the block once or twice. Since forming in 1992, they’ve spewed out volumes upon volumes of material, encompassing demos, splits, EPs and albums. Their latest effort Sickness In The North comprises 23 tracks of their typical batshit fare that once again shows that they’re not taking themselves too seriously. The problem is that there’s not enough of a joke for us to do the same.

Gorespring kicks us off in the right kind of direction: fast, frenetic and furious, laced with thrash guitar solos and beastly vocals, it’s a solid track that shows what the band is capable of. Before long though, it takes a plunge into madness, with the trite Lavatory Sickness and loathsome Chainsaw Fury existing only to waste your time. 

There’s also an uninspiring air lingering about Sickness In The North: the likes of Hammer Smashed Japanese Face and Welcome To The Jungle Rot besmirch the songs whose names they’ve stolen and made worse, and songs like Funeral Orgy try so hard to be edgy that you wind up laughing at them, not with them. Even the big, stupid chorus it tries to shoehorn in between some of the worst lyricism you’ve heard all year (“Suck me to death, suck me tonight” – seriously?) does nothing but grate on your nerves.

At a certain point, it would seem that BIRDFLESH became so preoccupied with what they could do, that they didn’t stop to think if they should. With questionable track titles such as Pedophile Pal, Chained To The Wok and Incest Melodies, they are unable to create anything to take the attention away from the names. What ends up happening in each instance is that we get another amorphous lump of novelty grindcore that lacks any defining characteristics other than to try and be funny – like that kid at school who tried to make up for their lack of personality by attempting to be the class clown, but just winds up being unlikeable.

To their credit, there are tracks that do stand out, such as Fat Pigs, which is like a fever dream in song form. Taking elements of PRIMUS and fusing those wonky bass lines with bad recorder playing and the performative voices of a 1970s TV comedian, this is the track that best stands a chance of eliciting a chuckle, or at least a sharp puff of air from your nose, but solely because it is so weird, sandwiched as it is between the relentless Crazy Pit and death-heavy All The Ages. 

Sickness In The North lasts just 27 minutes, but it feels far longer than that. Full of neanderthal, knuckle-dragging music, BIRDFLESH’s ‘wacky lyrics and funny atmosphere’ that was promised in the press release just results in a daft and dull record. But that’s the thing with “cult” anything isn’t it? Just look at The Room. People seem to love that film, so there might be a subset of people out there that will love this, too. Maybe.

Rating: 4/10

Sickness In The North is set for release on April 21st via Everlasting Spew Records.

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