Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Iwrestledabearonce
Label: Century Media
Release: 2011
Length: 31:46
Rating: 4.7/5
When it comes to explaining the nonconformist form, the name or the sheer punch of the American djent avant-garde movement, you can’t pin down the borders of its universe without borrowing comparisons from the crime pages. Picture a brutal chain-reaction pile-up on a fog-choked highway, scored with a jazzy soundtrack. That’s roughly how you’d approach the apocalyptic vision and perfection of this Louisiana four-piece, steered by the exceptional and gutturally effective singer Krysta Cameron. She’s found her own way to settle accounts with the demons of the past, painful memories and transience, and she drags first her bandmates, then the stunned and thrilled listeners, along on a wild ride down the steep slopes of bloody sensuality. And this bizarre trip into the unknown lacks neither a sense of aestheticization nor caricatured, bizarre send-ups of current crazes.
Ruining It For Everybody is exactly what you’d expect once your rattled brain has calmed down a bit from its first encounter with the debut It’s All Happening. This is a band you can easily fall in love with or hate so sincerely that it won’t matter one bit that the foundations are tectonically staked into the bedrock of metal. On top of it all hangs a legacy of electronics as well as the kitschy beauty or ugliness of seventies disco, and into the brutalized sketches of sensuality blend so many sweet, tender and operatic moments that your body can barely settle down and stop quivering from all the baroque, kitschy stucco and the psychedelic side effects of surrendering to fate.
I said earlier that this is a logical follow-up to the debut, but really, the half-hour epic that is Ruining It For Everybody is an evolutionary leap onto a higher plane of perception. Iwrestkedabearonce have leveled up and cleaned up, swapped a few weak links in their old ranks and steered freely into the dark waters of the unknown. First there was the core they went through, then in their own rebellious way they shook it off and enriched it. Instead of sweaty dudes, this time you get to enjoy the sight of the nonconformist beauty of the hard-hitting quartet’s lead throat, who besides looks has plenty of great lyrics to offer, a gothic diva persona and a convincing chameleon-like molt from delicate, fragile girl into elusive fury. There’s a lot of exaggeration, but with IWABO it all makes sense and fits the context. The noise is the canvas, onto which they paste collage cuttings of exceptional meter, gorgeous devastating shockwaves of guitars and drums, and impressive blasts of air squeezed out of overfilled lungs. The album is a therapeutic catharsis that stretches from the first bars of Next Visible Delicious and wraps up in the context of Button It Up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AhIlsqtYe-8
In between, there’s everything: the gullibility of the masses who swallow whatever the media serve them, the propaganda machine of politics, religion, or just the eternal mantra of the inevitable end of the world. The final moments are tied to darker themes: abductions, murders and the dismemberment of young girls. It’s about unmasking the illusions of the internet, about the abuse of the powerless and rape in the most primal sense of the word, and IWABO tackle this too with surgical precision. At the same time, it’s also a peculiar collage and homage to departed relatives, grandparents and ancestors, thanks to whom our bloody string of existence and suffering can be put into words at all and articulately woven into the empty spaces of the world we live in.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekxrVujlSys
And across all that juicy content spills juicy music, sporadically shifting from synthetic bursts of electronics, while the cloak of artifice is at times stripped off the skeleton so delicately that you can clearly sense the metallic polish, the coreish wobbliness and the love for modern cyber jazz. The choice of guests on the record is part of the imagery too. The most important might be the last name on the list: the singer of All Shall Perish adds a pinch of masculine rage on Button It Up, but I personally lean more toward the tender, melancholic melos of Fair To Midland singer Darroh Sudderth, who, as the lover of the psychotic singer, is delightfully woven into the fight of Gold Jacket, Green Jacket. There’s plenty of wonder, and it shows in the funny, ambiguous titles. The peak is the gargantuan string of words in the title Karate Nipples, Deodorant Can’t Fix Ugly stabs you in the eye with sarcasm, and in Break It Down Comacho it’s less the name than the closing bars that make you flinch, as IWABO move completely naturally from feedback into what’s probably one of the last voicemails Krysta’s grandmother left on her answering machine. We voyeurs feast and grumble, while Krysta creates her tragic vignettes with enthusiasm and undiminished power.
What undoubtedly marks Ruining For Everybody out is that IWABO have reached a purification and climbed the steep slopes to the ridge of their own identity without compromising one bit of their potential for further heresy. The record is exceptional and raw in its emotion, and despite my stubborn allergy to the abused recipes of generic core, I can say with certainty that there are some gorgeous exceptions in the sea of crap. Iwrestledabearonce are undoubtedly one of those bright musical diamonds that make it worth looking up at the sky above the core wasteland and, at least for a moment, letting yourself not judge music by genre labels or an infantile cover. A schizophrenic dance along the edges of personal abysses turns out every now and then to be a great combination of elements, which makes returning to the scene of a bloody crime one hell of a sweet pastime …
Lineup
Krysta Cameron – vocals
Steven Bradley – guitar, programming
John Ganey – guitar, programming
Mike Montgomer – drums, backing vocals
Mike ‘Rickshaw’ Martin – bass, backing vocals
Guest musicians:
– Miiko Scott – backing vocals on ‘Deodorant Can’t Fix Ugly’
– Ashley Nicole – backing vocals on ‘Deodorant Can’t Fix Ugly’
– Darroh Sudderth – backing vocals on ‘Gold Jacket, Green Jacket’
– Herman Eddie Hermida – backing vocals on ‘Button It Up’
Production
Steven Bradley & Ryan Boesch
Tracklist
1. Next Visible Delicious
2. You Know That Ain0t Them Dogs’ Real Voices
3. Deodorant Can’t Fix Ugly
4. This Head Music Makes My Eyes Rain
5. It Is ‘Bro’ Isn’t It?
6. Gold Jacket, Green Jacket
7. Break It DownCamacho
8. Stay To The Right
9. I’m Gonna Shoot
10. Karate Nipples
11. Button It Up
