Crotchduster - Big Fat Box Of Shit
Willowtip
Disco Grindcore
9 songs (41.53)
Release year: 2004
Crotchduster, Willowtip
Reviewed by Kayla
Album of the month

There’s a philosophical statement about a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters eventually producing the works of Shakespeare. It’s meant to convey that if you have enough random events, some recognizable order will emerge just from the sheer volume. In considering the sublime ridiculousness that is Big Fat Box Of Shit, that concept takes on a slightly new meaning; if you put enough randomness together, you’ll end up transcending order and convention, and create something awe-inspiring in its insanity.

My prose here is unbelievably purple for a reason. You simply can’t talk about Crotchduster in standard musical terms, because there’s nothing standard about their music. Big Fat Box Of Shit is built on a bewildering array of musical genres, from thrash, grindcore and death metal to disco, rap and over-processed boy band pop. There’s no such thing as melodies or harmonies in their songs, because none of their songs remain within a single genre long enough build anything resembling a typical song structure. There are surreal pieces of familiarity, homages to metal giants like Slayer, Megadeth and Deicide spiking the feverish experience. It’s not plagiarism, although the riffs are identical; there’s a pervasive self-consciousness that makes it obvious these guys know exactly what they’re referencing and invite the listener in on the bizarre, irreverent hero-worship.

The content of the songs is just as surreal as the music itself. Taken line by line, they make absolutely no sense whatsoever. At any given time, you’re just as likely to be hearing about the therapeutic value of unspeakable sexual acts as a spoken-word telephone exchange about Chinese food and moldy laundry. There is, however, a weird sort of story that emerges from the whole about a dump truck that can cross interdimensional lines and a substance called “mammal sauce.” There’s an entire song devoted to this miraculous substance, although the listener is no more enlightened as to what, exactly, this stuff is or does afterwards. It gets a little repetitive at the end, repeating a mammal sauce-praising quatrain in half a dozen vocal styles for the last three minutes.

The production is excellent, and despite the illusion of chaos, there’s a highly planned feel to the songs. There has to be, to make the jump from funk to death metal sound almost natural, and like something other than a drug-induced mess. The only track that really suffers from a surfeit of randomness is the last, a fifteen-minute sprawl that’s more spoken word fiction than song, and ends with the duo responsible for the whole thing reading “fan mail.” On the one hand, when your album is as ambitious as this one, you feel the need to end it with something truly epic, but after the first eight minutes, it starts feeling bloated. (I think I might have violated Massachusetts’ obscenity laws when I played it on my radio show in college, but that’s another story. Thank you, western Massachusetts FCC guy, for not listening to me that night.)

It takes a certain incredibly twisted sense of humor to really enjoy something like this. Although there is undeniable musical skill and talent present, it’s dedicated to sickness and silliness in equal measure, and doesn’t try to break new ground in any of the individual genres represented, however skillfully. There isn’t anything else like it, however; the closest comparison I can draw is to Zimmer’s Hole, although Crotchduster goes far above and beyond them, just in terms of sheer musical schizophrenia. If you’re the type who fully admits to and enjoys being completely off their nut, you’ve just found your band.

Killing Songs :
Mammal Sauce
Kayla quoted 90 / 100
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