Spitfire delivers listeners an average day in hell
Virginia Beach's Spitfire delivers its second full-length album, which hurts your head, damages your psyche and crushes your soul all at once.
Published March 10, 2006
Virginia death metal quintet Spitfire is back with Self-Help, its second collection of noise and indecipherable vocals.
The band broke up in 2001, and somewhere along the way decided it needed to bother the world one more time.
I don't know how band members managed to get this idea into their heads, but I hope they take the hint after this album fails and never — I mean never — come back.
To say Self-Help has a dense sound would be the understatement of the century.
Relentless and sludgy guitars tear along for the entire half hour without end. Drums pound and crash in the same rhythm and the bass is inaudible. If you listen really closely, you might hear it once or twice.
The word "rhythm" should be used loosely when describing the drums. The album contains virtually no rhythm, harmony, melody or any kind of understandable vocals.
This is not music, but merely a collection of noise and fuzz presented in the same tone and in a seemingly random order.
The only part of the album that even resembles a change of pace from the torrid suicide rock is its closer, "OHM Driver," which sacrifices the breakneck speed for amp feedback and drum soloing. During "U.V. I.V.," the band plays an old recording of a man preaching the art of tranquility, and then gives way to the familiar murderous guitars and drum pounding. There's a stark contrast. We get it.
I assume the members of Spitfire actually do know how to play their instruments, or at least a few chords, but they provide no evidence of that in Self-Help.
The band seems to have a formula: power chord, loud drums, screamed vocals. Rinse, wash, repeat. It is so simple that a group of monkeys could probably get together and cover this album in a week.
When I listen to music, I expect it to make me happy or at least make me think. Spitfire attempts to do neither.
I actually think the band is trying to do the opposite, which is the real disturbance here. This music is designed to make you unhappy.
Spitfire wants you to have a terrible day, and there is no way you can sit through this album and not become miserable.
The absolute hopelessness in every song is just crushing. This would be perfect music for the U.S. government to use to torture terrorists.
At one point, singer Jon Spencer screams, "I believe in the power of self-help." This is a good thing, because therapy might not be enough to heal you after sitting through this album.
Take away that lyric, decent album packaging and the band's nifty Web site, and there really i s nothing to gain from this experience.
Spitfire is the simply the bane of musical existence.
