I have recently discovered Blabbermouth (www.blabbermouth.net), a semi-Roadrunner-affiliated online music magazine with news and reviews. They are quite different from Metal-E-Zine - for starters they have someone who is actually pretty good at web design, a side of things that is flagrantly ignored here with the "content is more important than visuals" excuse here :-)

Another major difference is that each review has a 'discussion board' link. This basically means that, within nanoseconds after a review has been posted, there are vitriolic polemics going on. "Your review sucks" and "All people who say that the review sucks, suck" kind of pointless arguments. It's provided me with quite some joyful hours of entertainment to check out the funnily infantile arguments, laced with politically incorrect remarks, bad grammar, and the unmistakable impression that the only ones contributing to these discussion boards are pre-teens.

Why the above? Because this is going to be a review that would get exactly the same sectarian treatment had it been posted on Blabbermouth. This goes for most reviews, in fact, as reviews tend by definition to be opnions and opinions tend by definition to be subjective.

The silly band name aside (in fact 'silly' seems to be much too friendly a description, but I haven't got my insult generation software handy), Vulgar Pigeons make a load of pointless noise. I can't judge if the music is technically in any way decent, because the production is so atrocious that only one thought can occupy the listener's mind: "Are they consciously trying to make my stereo equipment sound damaged?" On "Lampshade Desire" I swear they're using pots and pans for drums, there's a misplaced piano-with-spoken-bits 'ballad', there's some grunting reminiscent of Cock And Ball Torture, and there's a lot of "Yes We Are Righteously Angry" type song titles like "Police = Shit", "Fuck the Police (Bump)" and this one, "In the Hands of a Benevolent Chimpanzee Scientist". Whatever.

Usually, bad albums are ignored by me. In fact, I received about half a dozen Adipocere promos recently but none of them were any good. Vulgar Pigeons' "Summary Execution", however, was bad enough to warrant this review.

Having said all the above things about Blabbermouth and the fact that reviewers by definition tend to have their own opinions that should be respected, I think Blabbermouth's Borivoj Krgin does not like metal at all. His opinions, in fact, suck :-)

RK

Written December 2002

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