The_Network poises itself to be one of the weirdest albums of 2007 despite the fact that it was released on the twenty-third day of the year. While they were lead to write the songs on This is Your Pig's Portrait after attending a Bloodlet show, I don't think all but the most trained and knowing ears would pick Bloodlet as an influence on the band. While there is a good bit of the heavy, mid-placed groove of old Holy Terror bands, they mess around a lot with making grind kind ofââ¬Â¦poppy? Their blast beats have a weird jangle to them that sounds off to me, and I'm sure it's intentional since it's most frequently accompanied with screamo-squeals. And just as you're becoming acclimated to the oddities of the first minutes of the disc, the acoustic outro of "Innocent v. State" jars you back out of place. The "gang vocals" that follow it then throw you for another loop.
And since I'm talking about jarring vocal arrangements, the_Network uses two of the strangest combinations of vocalists I've ever heard. One guy sounds like Deadwater Drowning or Premonitions of War (those are different guys, right?) while the other sounds like a nasally Some Girls. At first this description is off-putting, but it fits with the lack of cohesion in the disc. A few of the breaks feel like they could have been lifted out of a Cannibal Corpse record, only to be followed with some weird, off-kilter punk maybe akin with something Youth Attack would put out.
To be honest, I've never really heard anything like these guys. It's not insanely heavy. It's not insanely fast. It's not insanely weird. It sounds like dudes whose iTunes have more variety than most people could stomach. This is Your Pig's Portrait is kind of all over the place, but not in a bad way. Just in a, "Waitââ¬Â¦what?" kind of way. It's never bad to be questioning the boundaries of what's really hardcore and what is too pretentious and full of itself to be labeled anything besides lame. Fortunately, I can say with some sense that the_Network are the former.
P.S. Watch out. These kids have an actual website. Check it out.
