The Game Of Life

 Although the band’s very beginnings were far more tongue-in-cheek, and the guys from Santa Cruz cooked up a pretty demented brand of goofing around to kill the boredom of their daily grind, the members of Arsonists Get All The Girls quickly grew into a sextet of six individuals who, in a transformed form of total lunacy, bred a beast ready to carve up and butcher everything in its path with the choicest drops of dementia. The Game Of Life is the first outing in which these American clones of bands like Dance Club Massacre, Despised Icon and, in a battered, almost unrecognizable form, recycled Cryptopsy influences have squeezed it all onto a slightly-over-half-hour disc. And after the first listen it’s clear that the carnival of colors is a hesitant sprinkle of melody and hard, multi-tone rhythmic outbursts of rage, slipping out of any definition from song to song.

Production duties this time went to Zack Ohren, who has produced slightly lesser-known bands like Animosity and Light This City, and who now steered through the gloomy channels of a blurred subconscious in the studio. Vocalist Remi, who occasionally bangs on the keyboard keys too, guitarists Nick, Cameron and Arthur (nowhere near a Maiden-style sophisticated guitar interplay, which I find pointless anyway, since it’s impossible to tell by ear that three dudes are rubbing their fingers over guitars), bassist Pat and drummer Garin have thus just squeezed out a fresh dose of pus from an open wound. The label calls them the sound of a train full of gays derailing on its way to the city. Very appealing to all the psychopaths and homophobes out there. What you can really hear is the lack of a clear vision: do they want to belt out insanity and madness, or are they just rambling and tossing scattered bits into a melodic cellophane wrapper, hoping the end result actually has a head and a tail. The opening track, ‘Business In The Front’, promises a mellifluous overture, reminiscent of the intro tracks of some Creed rather than of the crazy six. That’s just a phase, a feeling at the back of my neck tells me. Then comes the first landing of a perverted will to shock. ‘Save The Castle Screw The Princess’ is a pretty worn-out cliché that kicks off as the glamorous orchestration of some Amon Amarth who have begun besieging the castle walls, banging on the gate and then raging because nobody opens up. And when they finally do climb the walls, they discover the princess is a plump, hairy-legged sixty-year-old. The previously promised rape is hardly called off. And the guys burn a full five minutes of your listening time on this, without actually doing anything shattering. I expect more from what follows, and we somehow shuffle our way to the track ‘Mantipede’, where either Remi’s split vocals or the needless keyboard noises convince you that the poisoners of your youthful minds listened to something other than just metal. You can hear an S.O.I.A. singalong and then you get strained through a catheter into the next sphere. ‘Cuffed To Your Ankles’ is an inseparable part of that whole, and in the second half of the song it serves up one of the prettiest melodic instrumental interplays. With AGATG the mess starts the moment Remi opens his mouth, while when they’re alone in their melodic dance they muster a speck of healthy musical awareness and much-needed logic, which lets someone besides mentally stunted potential serial killers listen too. ‘Shoeshine For Neptune’ continues the previously charted parabolic flight of a short-winded sparrow over a field, and they carry on the grindcore symphony with their vision of what it’s like to get eaten by rats … ‘Tourtasia’ is a heard-before heap of mud they couldn’t cram into the already-heard ‘Mantipede’, while I’m much happier about the almost ska-flavored – grindcore collage of ‘Claiming Middle Age a Decade Early’. The joy is short-lived. AGATG are here, after all, to strip you of your last wish to keep listening, yet I stubbornly keep listening. The principle of empty-headed farting also governs the “grand” finale of the record, which in the last half of the album sounds like an overstuffed streetcar of a filler album. ‘Taiwanese Troft Trouble’ is a freak festooned with oriental layers of keyboard kitsch, and the pedophile treat ’13 Year Old Ruby’ sounds like a game of hopscotch. Jazzy and NoMeansNo-ish, some would say. Right up to the fifteenth repetition of a riff that had already said its piece in lonesome bass form, and now the instrumentalists, obsessed with four notes, started getting visible goosebumps. The listener gets them too, since here they herald total revulsion. ‘Robando De Los Muertos’ is a baroque organ interlude with a pretty good but still half-baked idea, which, with the usual padding, repeats an already hinted-at, if not already stated, phrase portraying the life of your average choir of common-sense idiots who want to woo you with a madness they simply can’t pull off. And then, the great salvation! ‘So You Think You Know About The Game Of Life (Party In The Rear)’ is the last attempt at a frontal assault, after which all that’s left is counting your lost teeth.

The persuaders are out of the game. You can switch off the player and go blow up your neighbor’s rabbit hutch to unwind, since rabbits with bleeding asses (that scene adorns the cover, after all) will get on your nerves from today on… AGATG went so far with their warped inside humor that, in the heat of the moment, they forgot to write anything original, and the extreme dividing lines of the metal genre remain unchanged. The metaphors, painted in retrospect, offer only a lack of desire to grasp what the blabbermouths were trying to say. The Game Of Life sounds hollow, and if this is life in all its fullness, then it’s time for a ritual slaughter and draining the blood from open veins.