Bad Guys – Bad Guynaecology
And the 2015 [sic] magazine award for bad taste goes to … Bad Guynaecology. You get the impression that life is one big joke for London-based stoners Bad Guys. There’s that album title, obviously. Their “art”-work and hugely tongue-in-cheek press release, too, wherein it’s difficult to know quite what to believe as part of it is pure parody: “Recorded in a snake pit, in a quarry, on top of a mountain, in the desert, at night, during a thunderstorm … vocals laid down on seven-foot wide steel tape, then smelted into WAVs by an irritable dwarf in an ancient forge, in space.” The remainder then reads like an obnoxious checklist of some boring bullshitter’s top ten drinking stories.
The thing is that jokes, no matter their wail and chug, wear thin over time, meaning an album full of them likely has no longevity whatsoever. Bad Guynaecology is comprised of juvenile tales about shoplifting toys, forced naivety in the form of the literal “Prostitutes (Are Making Love In My Garden)” and a ridiculous thrash on the subject of a ridiculous motorhome cruise, which is all a bit of a shame really because, beneath the lyrics, there are fleeting passages of pretty cool hard-rock/heavy metal to be found.
Bad Guys are definitely better when they tone down the “humour”. Despite its theatrical Nordic growl, “World Murderer” is fairly decent doom, for example, its leaden fuzz so thick it feels like headbanging in a diving bell, and the epic closer is nothing less than a 12-minute rifftacular. Bad Guys are nevertheless a fairly limited party band. Remember that there’s a fine line between the dumb-but-fun and the plain dumb and these guys’ trespasses cannot be forgiven.
Best track: “Reaper”
~Bad Guynaecology is released March 16th on Riot Season Records.~