Stupidity Hole

Here’s a review from the Cool Try days.

I’m not sure as to why I included the two opening sentences in the final version of the review. I think that it may be due to struggling with coming up with an opening paragraph.

I had to listen to part of the album again to understand the second sentence. It makes sense.

This review was written over a few hours after hearing the album for the first time. I think that it feels like a complete review, but it also could’ve been much better written.

It certainly is one of the faster ones I’ve written.

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Anyway, I hope you enjoy.

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After listening to Deez Nuts, I can confirm that they are not almonds.
However, they may secretly be fronted by Jon Toogood.

The opening tracks, “Binge” and “Purgatory” are rather deceptive in that they don’t give a good indicator of the rest of the album. “Binge” is a melodic, almost airy track and “Purgatory” sounds as though it could have come from Shihad’s Love is the New Hate rather than a hardcore punk band.

The remainder of the album is slice after slice of unadulterated hardcore punk.
The songs come in, hit hard, then drop out quickly. All the songs are brief (the longest is almost three minutes and twenty-four seconds), much to the benefit of the band as it’s easy to hear that these songs could easily become tiresome to hear if they were longer.

There’s a real deftness to how Deez Nuts move through each passage, shifting from fast to not as fast and occasionally medium pace with no audible difficulty. Each moment sits well with each other, nothing sounds as though it was jarringly shoved into a song, with the result being that everything makes sense.

The lyrics seem to veer between straightforward and “deep”. There’s not much to say about them. They’re not amazing by any measure, but the way they sound works well with the music and the cadence of the vocals.

However, there isn’t much here that hasn’t been heard before. Like “Purgatory”, plenty of the songs here could come from other bands. There’s a strong sense of familiarity found throughout that’s hard to shake. With that being said, it doesn’t sound like a cynical attempt to copy other bands, with the album sounding as though a lot of hard work went into crafting and developing the songs.

There’s a lot of enthusiasm in the delivery of the music. It avoids sounding dour or morose, and is mostly made of stuff to which you could dance along. Essentially it sounds quite fun.

Furthermore, the overall whole has the songs sounding like they belong to each other rather than any individual groups. They’re quite cohesive with each other, flowing well rather than sounding like a bunch of songs placed with each other with no discernible reason as to why.

On Binge & Purgatory Deez Nuts have provided a decent collection of hardcore songs.
They don’t stray too far outside of a well-established template for this kind of music, but they do deliver. The album sounds lively and genuine, which is more than can be said for a lot of acts out there.