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Listen
to this one three times in a row last night and now I got some
sore buttocks. Went to do some research on the band’s MySpace
page and they have some pretty nifty photos of their live
shows. It certainly looks like a ‘bloody good time’ like
these Nottingham natives would say. And I am saying ‘bloody’
in the sense that all willing to jump into that hellish pit
shall sign a waiver liberating the band from all sorts of
consequences, especially those including medical bills. I assure
you Army of Flying Robots is the kind of band that actually
sounds better in a closet, or a kitchen or any enclosed domestic
environment, as long as it is not a big venue where the distance
from band to audience is beyond arm reach. The songs from
Life is Cheap would certainly sound all the more real while
played against that setting; you know pastel walls, white floor
tile, a couple of family pictures displaying how we all, the
nucleus of society, function with a hypocritical smile. All
would be tainted, spoiled, marred and deflowered within the
first seconds growing seconds of “Drown” where the band goes
from zero to ugly within exactly one minute and six seconds.
Then, do
some neck bending exercises or place a pillow on your ass. Army
of Flying Robots doesn’t waste time with allusions. The first
track is plain and simply titled “How is That for a Kick in the
Cunt?”, to which my most immediate response would be; pretty
darn good lads! It usually takes cookie monsters to distort
lyrics beyond all point of recognition, but now leave it up to
vocalist Henry Davies to go to the other side with an uncooked
boil approach. His throat is in raw flesh here, almost black
metallish (about half of “Embodiment” is purely that), while his
air friendly robotic army drops some pretty killer blend between
hardcore and grindcore. It’s not fully on the grind side because
there is plenty of structure and the band commands the tunes
instead of letting the tunes command their sound. The guitar
arrangements of Andrew Morgan and Simon Fitzpatrick deliver not
only lightning fast riffs but variable textures in sound and
coordination. It could be argued that the most grindcore aspect
of the Army of Flying Robots then is the vocalist, but these
guys handpick their stuff; “Fimbulvetr” breaks in sonically and
is so impatient it does not even let the previous song “Salt”
come to a proper end. It pummels and straddles a line between
grindcore and crust and shakes you like a Joan Collins face
slap. Thank you ma’am, may I have another?
MySpace
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