The background of this band shouldn't need explaining - if you're at all tuned in to the world of grindcore and other extreme music styles, you've probably already heard Agoraphobic Nosebleed. If you haven't, just imagine the most obnoxious and abrasive mixture of lyrical obscenity and overdriven drum machine lunacy you can fathom, and that should suffice for now.
The band's newest release, Agorapocalypse, demonstrates a fairly significant departure from that trademark sound. It's still fast and brutal, but the drumming speeds are much more modest and the tracks actually feature coherent song structures. The cybergrind tag often assigned to ANb might not really work for this album. Even The Poacher Diaries, one of the few instances of ANb sounding like a somewhat conventional band, is more raw and abrasive than this album.
The other big change most listeners will notice is the addition of Katherine Katz, who also does vocals for Salome. Katz's vocals are NUTS. She basically sounds like a female JR Hayes, and she definitely is the standout vocalist in Agorapocalypse. This isn't the first time she has appeared with ANb - she said in an interview with Brooklyn Vegan that she recorded vocals for the ANb/Crom split 7", but most listeners won't come across that. It's worth noting that she also contributed vocals to the Pig Destroyer track "Lost Cause" on Terrifyer.
The album opens with "Agorapocaylpse Now," which as far as instrumentation goes, sounds like an evenly-balanced combination of Pig Destroyer and ANb material preceding their Domestic Powerviolence split with Apartment 213. The crushing brutality is in abundance, but the ridiculous beat rates are mostly gone. Another notable difference is that Scott Hull plays a fair amount of high-pitched licks that might be considered solos, which he hasn't really done before.
What jumps out more than anything, though, is Katz's dominance as a vocalist. She easily steals the show from the two male vocalists, Richard and J. Randall, though she isn't necessarily featured more than them. The resemblance between her vocals and those of JR Hayes, whom she cites as her main influence in the Brooklyn Vegan interview, really is remarkable. I don't mean to diminish the contributions of Richard and J. Randall (who is, after all, ANb's chief lyricist), but Agorapocalypse is definitely the Katz and Hull show.
Ok, enough with the fan club pitch.
Scott Hull acknowledges Agorapocalypse as, in a way, ANb's first true album, and says that everything before it seems like a slew of demos. It's easy to see why he feels this way, Agorapocalypse is much, much more fine-tuned and cohesive than anything the band has made before. It feels like these songs are calculated attacks, whereas past ANb material takes a random kamikaze mentality. Not only does Hull grant more guitar creativity to this release, but his mastery of the drum machine is more apparent than ever. The drum arrangements on this album are really quite sophisticated. No track exhibits this more than "Question of Integrity," which ends with what is, as far as I know, ANb's first drum solo. On one hand it's ridiculous, but on the other, it sounds really good.
If you're one of those people who refused to embrace the absurdity of past ANb releases, it doesn't mean you have a good reason for not giving Agorapocalypse a chance. This album is much more accessible but compromises little to no ferocity. Why is it more accessible? Because the band made songs that have actual parts. Why doesn't it lack fierceness in doing so? Because this is Scott Hull's band. He isn't capable of anything but maximum intensity.
Bestial Machinery is still the best ANb release as far as getting a bang for your buck, but Agorapocalypse boasts a higher pound-for-pound quality than anything else they've made.
