Rating: 5.0
Country: Canada
Release Date: 2007
Record Label: Suffering Jesus
Track list:
1. L'Odeur Nauséabonde du Passé
2. Sans Voix
3. Accueillir la Mort
4. Sur Mon Passage
5. Attendant la Mort
6. Fanatisme et Mort d'Hommes
7. L'Insignificance de Vox Dieux
8. La Révolution du Silence
9. Chagrinés et Misérables
10. Ravages de l'Homme Blanc
11. Illumination
12. Cosmos Intérieur
13. À Petit Feu
14. Vent Glacial
15. La Grâce de Vivre
16. Traditions et Esclaves
17. Pousser au Suicide
18. Salvia
19. Énergie et Euphorie
20. Pompes Funèbres
21. Extensive Slaughter
22. Outro
Total playing time: 37:24
Contact: Malveillance |
Malveillance - Just Fuck Off
"F - Everything" - all instruments and vocals
"Just fuck off... Yeah yeah, of course, but keep one thing in mind; this "fuck off" is for all misanthropic losers holding this CD," Malveillance proudly declares on the back of the album sleeve. And on the inside of the CD case, the following cryptic, yet definitely mocking message waits to be read: "Baby face boo hoo hoo. Misanthropy is for cowards." But wait a minute; all this humanist pretention's coming from the sullen guy who's flipping us off from the shadows on the cover of an album called "Just Fuck Off"? An attempt at irony, perhaps, or is this just a case of ideological confusion? But regardless of the apparent hypocrisy present in Malveillance's image, I find this "fuck you and the scene you crawled from" attitude refreshing in light of the self-pitying, defeatist slump to which both worthy (Shining, for example) and artless, incompetent (I won't drop names, but the best example begins with "X" and ends with "asthur") black metal hordes are stooping nowadays. It's a sad, and perhaps inevitable truth that a genre spawned from the subversion of a stagnating metal scene's standards is now a sanctuary for alienated kids yearning for a subculture that offers, in their eyes, the pretense of unconditional nonconformity. So I get a warm, fuzzy feeling deep down like I just saw orphans get mauled by a bear when a band makes it clear that they're not here as a masturbatory aid for a bunch of goth version 1.5s. That's the main reason Just Fuck Off's mediocrity disappointed me; it's not just another kvlt tr00 album that fails on an artistic level, but a rare attempt at a "fuck you" to black metal and the trite scene politics it harbors that fails on an artistic level. And, as always, it's depressing to watch an underdog go down in flames.
For all its egotistical stride, Just Fuck Off is simply disgruntled D-beat black metal. It's something a press release might hype as "a slab of..." before their colorfully worded interpretation of what's essentially just another lo-fi Frankenstein monster assembled from the crustier bits of Hellhammer and Ildjarn. It pounds and thrashes along without regard for niceties like polished production and competent songwriting; so yeah, the ideology and aesthetics are undoubtedly black metal, but remove the superficial layer of grimness and snarled, frothing vocals, and what you're left with is a skeletal punk rock record that seems a little too self-conscious of its primitivism for its own good.
Occasionally, some sparse melodic lead work is employed, which seems decidedly paradoxical in light of how arrogantly the album revels in its own level of regression. Similar to Finnish warmongers Archgoat, Malveillance attempts to artificially inflate its inherently static music's sense of eclecticism by punctuating some of the riffs with overstated rhythmic variation -- but with significantly less success, as this "rhythmic variation" basically boils down to the emphasis shifting to the cymbals, which subsequently go "tap tap tap tap." Malveillance's creative peak is when these two techniques are combined, like in the song "Attendant La Mort", but such structural gimmicks are still too transparent to distract from the fact that Just Fuck Off is basically a series of variations of one three-chord punk riff drenched in black buzz.
Where Just Fuck Off fails is not that it's repetitive, but that it ultimately achieves nothing in its repetition. Every song pretty much has the same tempo and riff scheme, in a misguided attempt at producing some sort of purity of vision. And that's great, as I'm a firm believer that one has to write good music before dressing it up, but one also has to write good music before stripping it down. In the album's defense, some of the riffs do kill. "La Grâce de Vivre", for example, is good shit. But why should I have to dig through 22 songs' worth of impotent slop for that rare, coincidental case of 1,000 monkeys emulating Shakespeare? The real clincher, though, is the just-under-a-minute drone track tacked onto the end of the album; it held my attention more than any other song in the second half of the album. The centerpieces of good albums are not 50 second gauzy drone outros.
I really wanted to like this, but Just Fuck Off is exhaustingly tedious at best, and frustratingly lacklustre at worst. I like metal this simple to be more chaotic and potent in its riffs, and I like metal this punky to not masquerade as black metal. Going nowhere and proud of it, Malveillance is essentially a plane that rolls all the way to the end of the runway without taking off, then justifies it by telling you that flying is for fags. But if a French-Canadian guy with a lot of oldschool elitism to vent wanking into the void for a little over 35 minutes sounds like your cup of tea, take note of Malveillance; you just may have a new favorite band.
October 6th, 2007
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