ALBUM REVIEW: Volumes Of Vomit – Party Cannon
Sometimes, resisting the silly side of metal is futile, and in order to embrace a band fully one has to let their guard down and accept everything that gets thrown their way. Scottish loons PARTY CANNON, once known solely for their colourful, bubble writing logo on the poster for the 2015 Bay Area Deathfest in Oakland, California, have endeared themselves to many with their gleeful tomfoolery and dry-humoured social media presence, but it certainly helps that they’re a damn fine death metal/self-proclaimed ‘party slam’ outfit capable of mixing breakdowns with blistering riffs and drum fills. It’s been seven long years since their debut album Bong Hit Hospitalisation, but now they’re back with a follow-up, the delightfully titled Volumes Of Vomit out this Friday 14th via Gore House Productions.
Due to their relentless touring over the past five years, Volumes Of Vomit comes highly anticipated within extreme metal circles, and the riff on opening song Tactical Chunder, is as filthy as the finalised album artwork. The shift put in by drummer Martin ‘Count Blastula’ Gazur on this track alone sees him as immediate candidate for MVP on the record, although Stony ‘Grindsnort’ Reddie‘s transitioning from guttural growls to grindcore pig snorts and up to a higher pitch of screams is also a worthy contender.
For all the moments of clowning around – and we’ll get to those – there’s no denying that this is a stacked album of aural batterings for a listener to see just how literally they can snap their respective necks. The last two tracks – I Believe In Dani Filth and The Dirty Bubble – comprise nearly a third of the album’s length, but they keep your attention throughout with a barrage of riffs and quite disgustingly heavy guitar lines.
As mentioned above, there’s no shortage of quips and cartoonish moments over Volume Of Vomit‘s three-quarters of an hour runtime. Grass Obliteration – which features Don Campan from WAKING THE CADAVER – finishes with the spoken word exclamation “I’ve been initiated/I am a drug user/Fuck the police!” Even more amusingly, the very next song – Nauseating And Unpalatable (also with a featured artist, this time Ross Sewage of EXHUMED fame) – is bookended by samples from that viral video of a Scottish mother accusing her children of not flushing the toilet.
60 Stone Threesome opens with a skit from Jackass concerning a fart mask; Naked Beach Frenzy, more seriously, closes with a clip from a Louis Theroux documentary on alcoholism. Perhaps even more gravely, the song Electric Soldier Porygon, which sees the album’s third featured artist in CEREBRAL INCUBATION‘s Andrew LoMastro, takes its title directly from an episode of Pokemon that sent over 600 children into seizures across Japan when it aired in December 1997. Yet, for all that there might be a more sobering context to these extracts – pun not intended in the case of Naked Beach Frenzy – it’s all built up into the grand tapestry of PARTY CANNON, to be taken at the surface level and not explored too deeply, which is what would have been intended in the first place.
Is this album utterly bananas? Yes it is. However, is it also a heaving great slab of death metal that will cause faces to gurn and heads to bang? Abso-bloody-lutely. It might have taken PARTY CANNON the best part of a decade to release it, but Volumes Of Vomit is both sickeningly bruising and completely barking mad. It’s good to have you back with us, you utter buffoons.
Rating: 8/10
Volumes Of Vomit is set for release on January 14th via Gore House Productions.
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