Rating: 7.0

Country: USA

Release Date: 2006

Record Label: Nice To Eat You Records / Sevared Records

Track list:
1. Intro
2. Mudbog Massacre
3. Swiss Family Cannibalism
4. Gash Gnasher
5. Weapons Of Mass Defecation
6. Guttus Adulterous
7. Vile Piles
8. Cuffed And Snuffed
9. Hippie On A Stick

Band Website: Life At Zero

Life At Zero - Vile Piles

Andy Westcott - Guitar
Nick Pellerin - Drums
Tom Martel - Bass
Mike Ware - Vocals
Jeff Dobson - Guitar

Being a brutal death band and playing technical music, I'm rather surprised to note that Life At Zero's music isn't juvenile, irritating or one-dimensional. Several arduous listens however had to be endured in search of the truth of Life At Zero but ultimately, the knowledge of it being worthy of my money was worth the effort, which mind you, can only be undertaken if you have spent your money on it in the first place. A smart brutalhead (a paradox, I know) would buy this album now and save himself from putting up with my blabbering, but I must go on for the majority.

‘Vile Piles' has a myriad of riffs piled up on each other and if you were trying to keep a track of them, the fact that they would go over your head would be a terrible understatement. It would be pointless to compare them to any band or draw influences because they use them all. Every fucking trick in the book has been employed here. They juggle every damn thing they can get hold of and they juggle without dropping any one of them. By the time the album is over, their ring of juggled items would probably be as large as that of a Ferris wheel.

I'm sorry I can't get myself to end this review without comparing them to other bands. Luckily for you, it's become a bad habit for me. The brutal yet technical music on ‘Vile Piles' (great album name by the way) sounds for the most part, like a rancid mix of Terminally Your Aborted Ghost, Commit Suicide, Deeds of Flesh and Gorgasm, with some Cannibal Corpse-isms and Necrophagist-isms thrown in. As I said earlier, it's not irritatingly technical; it's demanding yet appeasing to one's brutal sensibilities. Their music might be jarring at times, but it's not incongruous. It's also not the slickest or the fastest or anything outstanding as such; they have utilised everything (including leads!) in moderation from this narrow sub-genre, even if they sometimes had to do it sneakily. You'd just hate them for being so versatile, even more so for pulling it all off. What is instantly likeable about them is that they aren't a mould of any of the big bands. Life At Zero are independent-minded, whimsical bastards by nature, not very easy to make friendship with at first, but hang out with them for a while and their behaviour won't seem too irrational.

To sum it all up, the ‘Vile Piles' listening experience is similar to the one that involves watching an aberrant art movie, not necessarily a great one, with an end open to various interpretations. At the end of it you get up dazed, harbouring mixed feelings about it but at the same time you can't free your mind of its disconcerting images. You reminisce several of its good moments and acknowledge the movie for being different from the mundane formulaic ones. The stereotypical crowd won't dig this nor will the fastidious types, but sickdicks would. They'd even want to go through it all over again with the hope of understanding it better, or if not that, just to relive the sick, challenging, mind-boggling brutal experience.

September 25th, 2006