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Birds Of Prey

Weight of the Wound

Written by: ASH on 23/08/2006 17:05:41

They came, they screamed indecipherable roars, and then they waved their artwork around, in hope of the audience wouldn't kill them for wasting their time with some mindless jibberish decoyed by a nice bandname. A shame, since they sound so much better on paper when you take a look at their roster from several renowned southern metal bands.

If we break it up, the whole album sounds like taking the drums, the guitars and the bass, throwing them all into a big blender along with some barbed wire and hear "Beaten Back To Pure's" Ben Hogg scream some nonsense, as he gets ripped apart by the push of the button. Give it thirty minutes of pain and presto, you get a gooey mass of tracks titled like: "Mangled by Mongoloids (Ripped Apart by the Retarded)", "Buttfucked with a Shotgun Barrel", "The Old Lady Rots (But the Checks Keep Coming)" and finally: "To Kill A Co-Worker (You Ain't My Fucking Boss Man)".

Like all albums there are better and worse tracks, but it is hard to discover what Hogg and his crew of "metal warriors" are trying to do in order to take this album to a higher level. The drums are nice on most tracks if you forget the sad attempt of an introduction on their first track, but everything else drags the album down the drain. Hogg's monotoneous voice along with some uninteresting guitar riffs by Erik Larson and Bo Leslie just give you that feel of exhaustion. And where did their bassist Summer Welch disappear?

Nevertheless, American "Birds of Prey" has a few ups where they let the listeners have some variation in the music. But you have to endure or skip some tracks before you reach "To Kill A Co-Worker (You Ain't My Fucking Boss Man)". Luckily, "Buttfucked with a Shotgun Barrel" comes a little before, so you get to hear something better even though their better is more like mediocre when compared to the industry standards.

It is a fact that Birds of Prey don't take shit from anyone and write what they want in whatever way they see fit. Just take some time to decipher Hogg's grotesque lyrics and you'll see it soon enough. To me, that's just a plus, but like many other bands there is too much of the good and this band can easily claim to take a first place position. In the end, Birds of Prey should try and focus more on their music than on their artwork.

Download: Nothing

For the fans of: Entombed, Superjoint Ritual

Listen: Nothing

Release date 31.07.2006

Relapse Records

Provided by Target ApS