Party Cannon: Party ‘Til You Puke
The year is 2015. Barack Obama is President, the UK is still part of the EU and Download Festival is headlined by SLIPKNOT, MUSE and KISS. It’s also how far you have to go back to find the last time PARTY CANNON released a full-length album, that being their debut Bong Hit Hospitalisation. New music has surfaced in the interim period, but seven years without a full album is a damn long time in this day and age – not for want of the band trying, though.
“The album was meant to be released in 2017!” sheepishly admits bassist Chris Ryan. “It was poor planning on our part, really – we released the first album, did a big tour of the States, came back and wrote five songs that we really worked hard on, and then got another offer to tour the States. We didn’t want to be touring just one album that was two years old by that point, so those five songs came out as an EP, we did the tour and came back, started again, wrote three songs, got an offer to play in Asia, so those three came out on a split EP, did the tour, came back, started over and the pandemic happened, so for us that was a good thing because we actually got time to write the album!”
He might say it’s poor planning but, given touring is a band’s main income and, by the time PARTY CANNON returned from that initial 2015 tour, they’d gone viral from that Bay Area Deathfest lineup poster, it feels justified for them to have kept riding the wave at that time. In any event, we now have a new album, the delightfully-titled Volumes Of Vomit, combining blistering death metal with the band’s now famous penchant for buffoonery and comedy without ever leaning too far towards the sillier end of the spectrum, a balance that Chris says comes naturally to them.
“It just happens, you know? I think that since we’ve never set a boundary of being a super serious death metal band and are just as influenced by tongue-in-cheek bands like WEEKEND NACHOS as we are by GOREGASM, we’ve been able to bring that sense of humour into our music in more of an ironic way, than anything else. Additionally, to write about subjects that would typically come up in grindcore and goregrind music just isn’t me, so we can write about mote realistic things that connect better. If you want to be really pretentious about this, modernism is being sincere about things, post-modernism is being ironic about things and method modernism is being sincere and ironic at the same time.”
So there you have it: PARTY CANNON, the first method-modernist metal band. New sub-genres aside, there’s a lot of pop culture references in Volumes Of Vomit to be amused by, from Louis Theroux to The Simpsons and that video of the Scottish lady berating her children for not flushing the toilet. Perhaps the most pertinent comes with the song Electric Soldier Porygon, which takes its title from an episode of Pokémon that sent over 600 children into epileptic seizures when it aired in Japan and has a new bulletin from the time preceding the song. More excitingly on a music front, there’s also guest appearances, one of which is EXHUMED’s Ross Sewage, who appears on the track Nauseating And Unpalatable.
“EXHUMED are one of my favourite bands ever; our vocalist (Tony ‘Stony Gindsnort’ Reddie) learned to do vocals by copying Ross as a young teenager, so to have him on the album was incredible. But even then, Nauseating And Unpalatable is probably my favourite track – I think it’s 100% everything I like about PARTY CANNON. From the sample at the beginning to the pig squeals, the slam riff, the changing time signatures, big chorus, the lean into New York death metal and goregind at points, it’s just the perfect storm.”
Chris also confirms that the band are in the process of writing their third record, with a particular focus on writing shorter songs; as he explains, with the band usually only playing 35-40 minute sets, they would rather cram in as many tracks as possible than take up the time with one that could be used with two. And talking of shows, there’s plenty of them about as well, from dates across the UK, a rare home country show in Scotland and a big tour of the States, their first for five years. As such, there’s plenty of opportunity to see these self-proclaimed ‘party slam’ loons play crushing riffs, make their fans do press ups in the pit and bring a host of inflatable items along ride. If you’ve ever wondered what death metal would look like if it wore comedy eyes on springs, you’ve just found it.
Volumes Of Vomit is out now via Gore House Productions.
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