Bound by Fire

There are some times when comedy is done so terribly that laughter can not be forced out even if a powerful urge to do so out of politeness is present. It is sort of akin to when something is overdone to the sheer point of becoming reality altering, such as a nightmare in a methane chamber. In essence, it could be likened to a particular scene from that one in a long series of spoofs “Extreme Movie” where a somewhat voluptuous female feels self-conscious about breaking out a little CH4, but upon a polite response from her significant other, proceeds to evacuate enough flatulence to ignite the entire city of Chicago. That is pretty much how to describe Zimmer’s Hole when listening to their utterly ridiculous debut “Bound By Fire”, a 27 minute farting session that offers life-giving O2 only during passages of silence, which actually ends up occupying about 1/5 of the listen.

The obvious inspiration for this tortured attempt at humor is S.O.D., and about 2 minutes into the listen it is easy to see where this band feel way short. While toilet humor and metal parody made up a sizable chunk of “Speak English Or Die”, Chris Valagao and the others didn’t really get how subtlety plays into the equation. Loading up a listen with more spoken gags, sound effects and bathroom sounds than there is actual music does not make for a good musical compilation, and even if it were a comedy album in the vain of Adam Sandler’s older works, the delivery is awkward and flat. “Two Headed Anal Baby” and “Gospel Sodomy Boy On Blow” accomplish little more than doing the last word of the latter song title, spending way too much time simply going “Wow, look at me, I can make unfunny references to scat porn and pedophilia to offend people that are already offended simply at hearing guitars with distortion”.

What little music there actually is to be heard on here randomly bounces back and forth between 80s speed/thrash, early 90s death metal clichés and a fair amount of hardcore and crust influences. Cohesion isn’t really high on this band’s priority list, nor is writing actual songs that can be followed apparently, as “Follow” spends more than half of its 3 ½ minute duration stuck on non-musical narrations and buffoonery, and the closing near ten minute bore of a title song “Bound By Fire” spends about 4 minutes in dead silence. “Fully Packed” makes a half-hearted attempt at throwing in some idiotic male vs. female in the bed situation humor, but packs more of a bent, limp, wrinkled old excuse for a punch line rather than the boner that I’m sure they thought they were planning to whip out at everyone. Occasionally there’s a few good musical moments to be found on “Waste Of Towels”, but for the most part, the few examples of something that can actually be tolerated are found on the sub-2 minute metal parody work on “This Is Metal” and “Terry”, all of it consisting of 2 riffs, steeped in 80s speed/thrash cliché and being about as vocally ridiculous as it gets.

The best way to really sum this up would be by taking Billy Milano and routinely kicking him in the balls during vocal recordings, removing about 65% of the musical content of one of their two respective albums (we’ll be generous and say it’s “Speak English Or Die”) and replacing it with lame comedy bits, and throwing it all together in an extremely jumbled fashion. It’s a foregone conclusion that most comedy albums lose their punch after about 2 or 3 listens, but this sad little excrement bag can’t even manage a limp-wrested tap on the ear at first listen. Zimmer’s Hole would definitely get better after this, and since this was put out in the mallcore turning to nu-metal obsessed year that was 1997, it is understandable that an album like this might be possible from musicians that are possessed of better abilities. But don’t let that conciliatory statement get the idea into your head that you should ever bother listening to this.

Bound by Fire, the first album from Zimmers Hole, a band that hasn’t a clue on what they’re doing. Zimmers Hole play a bizarre mix of death, grind, and various other stuff thrown in here and there. What makes Zimmers Hole stick out though is the excessive toilet humor embedded in each track. You know toilet humor, the stuff thats nothing but fart jokes and using profanity nonstop to make five-year-old kids laugh, you know that crap? Now you throw toilet humor in with some blast beats and riffs here and there and your result is Bound by Fire.

There are not too many positive things you can say about Bound by Fire. It’s an incredibly stupid album and only a complete idiot would want to listen to it when there are better albums from every genre known to humanity out there. Zimmers Hole try to be metal and funny at the same time with audio clips from cartoons and dialogue that has almost nothing to do with anything. Bound by fire has no direction anywhere. Just random nonsense. Zimmers Hole tried so hard to be random and humorous at the same time, but they failed. Now Zimmers Hole failed because of two reasons. Now those two reasons are simply that the band, as a whole isn't funny. That is due to toilet humor. The other reason would be that every song has no structure to them whatsoever.

Every song is a random assortment of sound effects and riffs. Bound by Fire has riffs yes, so every song is not just random audio clips and blast beats. Believe it or not, the album would be better without riffs. The riffs are all random, taken from random bands and played randomly on one of the fifteen random songs that can be found on Bound by Fire. On “P.B.C.” the only riff being played is from that KISS song “Detroit Rock City.” Some sound like they came from boring groove era Machine Head, and others from Strapping Young Lad. The problem is that Zimmers Hole take riffs from too many different places (too many genres) and the overall sound is horrible.

Horrible, the word that describes Bound by Fire perfectly. This album is horrible. Nothing good about it. Too many bad riffs taken from too many horrible bands. I didn’t mention the vocalist, but he sounds a lot like that guy from System of a Down. Only he is screaming at the top of his lungs a lot more. Frankly, that’s annoying. This whole album is annoy. This is a joke. Nothing more, and nothing less. It’s a joke that’s not even funny, kind of like Dane Cook doing standup. And just like Dane Cook doing standup, the only parts of the act that are not complete shit are stolen from somewhere else.

Once you've seen Zimmer's Hole live, you know their live-show out-does, out-metals, out-over-the-tops every live-act there has ever been. After being duly impressed on Dynamo Open Air 2002, I was curious to their album efforts. So I downloaded one.

Well, obviously I should have expected this not to be as good as seeing them live, but this was a bit less interesting than I could have anticipated. What this album basically is, is an attempt to be metal and funny at the same time, yet failing, mostly in the humor department. On repeated listens it becomes slightly more palpable, but not much.

The sound can best be described as a mix between speedmetal and thrashmetal, with obvious Devin Townsend influences (no wonder of course). Overall, it's a very inconsistent album however, with most songs around 1 minute 30, going from style to style without it working out well. And they try to cover every possible style in metal apparently, from heavy to gothic to death, all in a semi-thrashy way.

This album reminds me of Anal Cunt. The songtitles are better than the songs themselves, and usually look better on paper than in practice. For example the 'This Is Metal' song; an obvious parody on heavy/power metal, with exageratedly high vocals, is funny when it first hits you, but afterwards loses it's charm pretty quickly. I'd rather have some real Manowar/Hammerheart, even though I'm not exactly a fan. 'Gospel Sodomy Boy On Blow' starts out like an overly symphonic gothic/black song that actually sounds rather good, even if it is a parody. But after the initial laughing subsides, the track jumps from style to style a bit in a non-enjoyable way, in an attempt to make the idea funnier.

Ever had someone tell you he was going to make you laugh, and then failed, partly because he said just that? This album is just like that. It tries to be funny, but throwing in a Simpsons quote, or putting on a play with talk about sex in a rednecky manner does not equate to funnyness automatically.
Where Piledriver lyrics can seem unfunny if you just read them, but are definitely funny (or at least memorable) when you hear them in the context of the songs, Zimmer's Hole lyrics can only seem funny in the context of 'Hey we're going to do a metalsong, and it's about so-and-so'. Haha! Not.

There are some positive things to be said about this album of course. It can be a feast of recognition to hear all the bands/genres they parody. They even actually have pretty good riffs all the time, but the problem is they do nothing with them. If they have a riff that might make you headbang, it soon gets replaced by another riff, all in their attempt to parody a genre or make a funny song. And as they keep jumping styles and direction in every song, it's extremely hard to get into the music, they're just too damn inconsistent. I wish they'd use their talents to make actual music, as it's obvious they know how to play. They just can't write decent a song.