It’s time to get messy, as Squid Pisser returns to shower listeners in a hot mess of aliens, extreme metal, and bodily fluids on latest record Dreams of Puke (SKiN GRAFT Records).
Sometimes saying that a band isn’t going to be for everyone feels so self-evident as to be absurdly redundant: Squid Pisser has a lot of elements to put off the casual listener. There’s the grotesque, monstrous artwork of Dreams of Puke (featuring an array of disturbing, colourful faces, flopping organs and big, thick piles of spunk), song titles like “Virus Assholes”, “Felching Your God” and “Hermaphroditic Shopping Carts”, the creepy alien mask-wearing visual presentation of the band themselves, and not least, the chaotic, toolbox-in-a-washing-machine-falling-down-a-cliff-face fusion of punk, grindcore and sludge that these mostly-rapid in-out sonic bombardments have been squished into.
Any of the band’s overt grotesquery could turn away scores of potential listeners, but who needs another band playing it safe? Squid Pisser rules and Dreams of Puke is a disgusting, spunk-splattered joy of over-stimulated, extreme metal insanity.
The brainchild of multi-instrumentalist Tommy Meehan (GWAR, Deaf Club, Cancer Christ), Squid Pisser is quite a lot for the senses. Dreams of Puke, aesthetically, is so backed up with spunk and other fluids that it feels just writing about the album is making the keyboard sticky.
With the album’s twelve tracks often clocking in at not much more than a minute and a half a piece (the shortest, “Cancel the Family”, a forty-second grindcore explosion), Dreams of Puke is like getting abducted by aliens at the tail end of an all-weekend bender, being thrown into a sci-fi gang bang, only to be shat out onto the highway dripping wet, wondering what the hell just happened, before dawn’s even broken.
The album starts as it means to go on with a raucous cacophony of hardcore tumbling drums and wriggling guitars on “Heaven’s A Place On Earth”, before the track morphs into a sludgy stomp, reminiscent of Mr. Bungle’s “Everyone I Went To High School With is Dead,” or early Melvins.
Thoughts of Mr. Bungle pop up throughout the album with the frequent, gleeful bursts of almost-avantgarde carnival metal of tracks like “Felching Your God” and “Cancel the Family”. Dead Cross (another Mike Patton project) could also be a relevant reference point, but with the atmospherics largely squeezed out and the music condensed into a deranged punk/metal core.
Between the album’s super-brief expulsions, some of the longer tracks (up to almost three minutes in a couple of cases, what is this, Prog??) feature some particularly memorable sequences and some welcome progression that can’t easily be crammed into under a minute.
“Virus Assholes” is catchy in its galloping, romping punk riffing (that’s like an almost-normal song having an epileptic fit), “Gack Action Gods” features an awesome, spooky sequence of rising “oooooooh” gone in four seconds, never to return.
“Vaporize A Neighbor” gives off hints of Dillinger Escape Plan in the metallic riffing being sucked down into a vortex, while closer “Lord of the Slog” is another standout, with memorable, frothing vocal delivery.
Melt Banana (who Squid Pisser will be supporting later in June), share some of the band’s cartoonish, carnival delivery, but this is darker, way more demented and just generally vulgar and coarse in the best possible way.
Dreams of Puke will likely leave you feeling stunned and dirty. Just hose yourself down and go again.
Buy the album here:
https://squidpisser.bandcamp.com/album/dreams-of-puke
9 / 10
TOM OSMAN