This is a very difficult release to review.  If you haven't heard of Mortville Noise, then you haven't even begun to stick your toe in the underground.  In existence since human beings could secrete metal from their asses, Mortville and the man behind it was known for one thing, fucking shit, and he loved releasing it.  With some of the worst recording quality, some of the most obscure bands, some of the most horrible art, Mortville releases stood out in the underground for being on the very fringe of the fringe.  With the slogan "Flooding the Underground with Garbage" behind it, this release is a true swansong to a dying era, but one that probably should have died a long time ago.

Small Doses looks fucking awesome.  The album comes packaged in a beautiful, professional slipcase featuring a special, cut-out symbol and then a sleeve with pieced-together paper art for the design.  The CD itself is replicated, not the usual CD-R this label was known for, with pills all over it, and the insert includes a wonderful history of Mortville and some insights about the current music underground and the industry in general.  Each band was given a small amount of space to create a banner, and a number of them are quite creative.  Really, this thing just looks beautiful, very well-designed and thought out.  The historical segments are lengthy and incredibly interesting, with a touch of sadness.

Unfortunately, as cool as Small Doses looks, musically it's about the worst thing you're ever going to hear.  What you have is one hundred bands, each providing a song that's roughly thirty seconds.  This sort of thing has been done, but you still have to give Mortville credit for the amount of work and email prodding that had to have gone on in the creation of this release.  Getting a hundred bands to actually complete their work is huge task to say the least.  Small Doses, though, is a perfect glimpse into the history of Mortville Noise.  This album about sums up everything it ever released.  And thankfully, it does it all in no more than about thirty seconds per band.  Any more, and well, you'd probably kill yourself.

The unfortunate thing here, and no offense to the label itself, is quality control.  It's not that Mortville should have been more selective, quite the opposite, it's that the bands should have got their shit together.  It's clear the majority of these tracks were recorded last minute because they fucking forgot to do it when they were originally asked.  And, also very likely, some of these bands probably came into existence for this moment and then called it quits.  Most of Small Doses is horrible, horrible to the point that it can't possibly get any fucking worse.  Some of the bands are clearly stuck in the 90s when tape-swapping was still cool and email didn't even exist so you didn't know you weren't the only shitty band trying to be shitty in the world.  Most of these acts don't have a fucking clue what in the hell they're doing, and at other times they're fairly well known but have totally failed to come up with anything remotely interesting because they did it the night before.  In my estimate, there are only about three songs out of the hundred that are any good.  The bands behind them are Ablach, Comparative Anatomy, and Mummifier.

Ablach has a classic death metal sound and pulls off a nicely arranged track.  Comparative Anatomy provides yet another drum & bass rant of weirdness with monkeys for singers and samples about bananas, and Mummifier gives a glimpse into their eventual full-length.  Nice, doomy sound to those guys.  That, however, is it.  The rest of this album is pure shit.  Shit so full of undigested corn, blood, peanuts, and tomato seeds you have at least a week's worth of shitty leftover meals.  I applaud Mortville Noise for taking the time and energy to make something like this, but thankfully it's uber rare and only available if you know where to find it.  That is, at the bottom of a septic tank, floating amongst used condoms filled with loads blown in two pathetic pumps, leaving the girl (that's a symbol for you), to finish herself with something better (in this case probably symbolized by Fuck the Universe).

Written by Arkus

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