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Cremaster > Boletus Satanas > Reviews
Cremaster - Boletus Satanas

Why was this released? - 30%

Noktorn, February 8th, 2008

Joke bands are always a dicey prospect, because for every one that can actually be funny as well as make decent music, there's ten who fail miserably in one or both of those departments. Even for the ones that manage to succeed, it's hard to make a comedy album that's supposed to be a musically capable one as well that manages to maintain interest; frequently, either quality cancels the other out and you end up listening to it twice before shelving it indefinitely because you could either listen to better, serious music or look up Youtube videos of Patton Oswalt. It's a rare occasion that you say to yourself, "Man, I really want to hear some great heavy metal, but I want to laugh my balls off too."

Cremaster is a joke metal band from Poland that is decidedly NOT one of the handfuls of comedy groups that are particularly worth your time, falling prey to most of the elements that cripple bands of this nature. Cremaster, like most joke bands, doesn't adhere to any metal genre in particular; it switches between all of them because such wackiness heightens the humor, I guess. It's relatively uptempo and there's a fair number of blast beats, but there's also a lot of empty, sludgy parts with annoying, cackly vocals. The album doesn't really have any recurring qualities apart from those irritating vocals and the fact that all the songs include guitars and drums. And, of course, that they all have silly song titles.

So, even with this ostensibly 'eclectic' style, they don't really put together any music that's interesting. There's a lot of half-baked death/thrash riffs here and there and some moderately aggressive drumming, but it's not like any of it has any conviction behind it because, again, this is a joke band. The best track is the closing Gwar cover because it's not their own music. None of it is memorable, nor is it designed to be remembered. The band merely needed some music to carry the 'humor'. So if they've failed on one side, or at least chosen not to pursue it, do they succeed on the other? No, they don't, and I don't know how they can think they do. This isn't funny at all, and I can't imagine someone listening to this and laughing unless they were terribly, terribly high. The main issue is that there are no jokes here. None at all. 'Boleus Satanas' depends upon you finding random ideas juxtaposed to be the most hilarious thing in the world. Such humor works sometimes, but generally random juxtaposition is not very random at all, which is why most people fail at it. There's a bunch of abstract lyrics that aren't funny (especially when there's weirdly serious parts to them), and they're written in mildly bad Engrish, so they can't communicate any cleverness via wordplay. So again, what's the point? Who is this supposed to appeal to?

The only thing I can guess is that Cremaster is a total vanity project for guys who are in other, serious bands, and judging from the fact that all the members are in or have been in real death metal bands, that's probably the case. Somehow they got picked up by a label who was willing to press a CD. Why? I have no idea and I don't really care. There's no purpose to this. It's not overtly offensive, but it either does nothing that it sets out to do or it never intends to do those things in the first place. Either way, the verdict is the same: skip it.