Papsmear Campaign

Well, these guys certainly have a band name that grabs your attention from the off, don't they? Not a band you're likely to see on the cover of your favourite metal mag any time soon – but of course, that would never be Cuntscrape's aim. They are obviously just out for a good time, and they certainly seem to entertain themselves throughout this album with their dubiously extreme sexual humour with musical racket as a mere accompaniment.

To be honest, I was expecting something very different from these grindaholics. Noting that they hailed from Australia, my mind was perhaps expecting something along the lines of Blood Duster, possibly being overwhelmed by some South American styled over the top 'blast, fuzz and gurgle' pornogrind. But no, this is more along the lines of 'Gloom' era Macabre mixed with 'Symphonies of Sickness' era Carcass, and early Gorerotted. With that said however, there's not so much crushing grind on the album as you'd expect, this is much more in the realms of weird death metal for the most part – it's very hard to categorise because there's just so much weird shit going on throughout this album. There's a lot of porno samples mixed in to the music, which to me detracts from the actual quality of the album (not just because it had my girlfriend regularly tutting with furrowed brows aplenty, but because on most other levels they're actually not too bad at all).

Some of the songs, such as 'Fleshlight' have an utterly weird, schlocky 70s vibe about them, befitting the album perfectly – you get the feeling these guys are willing to give anything a bash, as seemingly everything that popped into their heads during the recording process went in to the final cut. The subject matter for most songs ranges from shagging grannies to wanting to hump midgets. Lame. I mean, I'm far from being a prude, I probably know more knob and fanny jokes than are necessary for any sane person to have stored in their long term memory - but this is humour at it's very basest of levels - a.k.a humour without the funny part.

I'm not normally the kinda guy that would jump for a band that name themselves Cuntscrape, but checking out some small samples on their Myspace page before accepting this for review, they did actually surprise me. Not just because I was expecting something a lot more extreme musically to go along with the gnarly band name, but for the fact that they actually have some fairly decent riffage crashing about the place, and occasionally some well put together songs…however, as a whole it's a little too much of a hotchpotch. 6 out of 10 for the music, 1 out of 10 for the painfully unfunny lyrical content.

Originally written for www.metalteamuk.net