With a name like ‘Dr Slaggleberry’ and the above inside-cover-of-a-maths-textbook-doodle-of-a-mad-scientist adorning the cover of this young three piece’s demo, one would expect ‘hillarious’ pop-punk, possibly with a comedy cover of a retro TV theme. Utter shite, in other words. With song titles like ‘Extra Strength Grandma’, my hopes are further destroyed.
Luckily – it’s so far from pop punk, it’s almost on another world.
What Dr. Slaggelberry offer up is three tracks of genre-hopping, ultra-talented, muso-pleasing, widdle-metal workouts. Sounding like Sixth with less aggression, or Mr Bungle but less freaky, Dr. S don’t do songs (they don’t have a singer, in fact) but smack the listener around the chops with riff after noodling riff. Amazing musicianship and made amazing-er by the fact that this whole demo was recorded live. At points, where the musical experiments mesh perfectly with the metal riffage, it almost reaches the genius of jazz-metal-gods Cynic.
Unfortunately, those moments are few and far between and for the most part the songs-cum-workouts are more about proving musical prowess rather than creating something listenable. It also suffers from being neither one thing or another, falling between the genre gaps and appealing to no one camp or another. Are they metal? If they had a singer roaring noises above the maths-guitar-wank, at least we would know.
To their credit though, Dr. S do something completely unexpected, different, and follow no scene conventions. They can also play like motherfuckers. Once they find a groove, they will drive it to success.
2 Comments
Picture conjures memories of Helloween.
Noooooo!
A cross between Brand X and Link Crimson.
It all sounds like one big intro to a song that never comes.
It’s to be expected when you have a band made up of three drummers, very rhythmical but no form.
I DO quite like it though, because I do like Brand X and King Crimson and fast guitar/bass riffs….