October 2021 Feature Release – The Sphere Edition

So just like that we find that a new month is upon us which of course means that we’ll be nominating a brand new monthly feature release for each clan. This essentially means that we’re asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter. We’re really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our chosen releases so don’t be shy.

This month’s feature release for The Sphere has been nominated by myself. It's the highly regarded 1990 debut album "The Last Temptation of Reid" from Chicago industrial metal supergroup Lard.

https://metal.academy/releases/1699

The repetitive structures that occupy the world of extreme metal (or just some non-extreme metal in fact as well) are often as much of a curse as they are a gift in my experience. On the one hand you have the punishing riff patterns of say funeral doom that layer an instant level of emotional torture at the door of the listener and subject them to a looped burden for several minutes at a time. At the opposite end of the spectrum are albums like The Last Temptation of Reid, that get lumped into the Industrial genre (quite unnecessarily) down to their seemingly endless regurgitation of punk riffs and spoken word vocals.

God this is juvenile! I mean if there is one thing that Jello Biafra should not have done in his career it is contribute anything to Lard. His Dead Kennedys legacy is all but made a mockery of here; stabbing riffs and tappy drums make for a punky urgency to proceedings but this is a piss poor attempt to try and revisit former glories on behalf Biafra. There is no entertainment value for me to Lard. Unlike The Dead Kennedys, there is nothing contentious here to make the immaturity rational or even fun to that end. It plays like a lazy (and nowhere near as talented) Jane’s Addiction record only somehow made worse by endless spoken word lyrics and predictable structures – yes there is a difference between repetition and predictability folks.

My overarching experience when listening to this album is that I just want it to stop and leave me alone. It is by far one of the most alienating albums I think I have ever heard and as such is memorable to me for all the wrong reasons. It cements for me the ever-growing notion that Al Jourgensen is one of the most over-rated artists in the history of metal. With Barker and Ward here to add more Ministry credentials to the Lard sound it all just underlines why I find Ministry so dull and uninspiring nowadays. Add to this the mindless song structures and terrible vocals and this makes for one painful listen.

0.5/5

Just so we're clear, am I to understand that you didn't like it much then Vinny?

What gives you that impression Daniel?

"God this is juvenile!"

"There is no entertainment value for me to Lard."

"There is a difference between repetition and predictability folks."

"Just want it to stop and leave me alone."

"It cements for me the ever-growing notion that Al Jourgensen is one of the most over-rated artists in the history of metal."

"Mindless song structures and terrible vocals."

"One painful listen."

Aaaahhhhhh.....so there's potential for Vinny's impressions to grow over repeat listens then. I understand now.

So I've been...persuaded by this thread to check this one out first this month. For no particular reason.

And I'm really glad I reread Vinny's post because I just got to "Mate Spawn & Die" and it completely stopped me in my tracks because I said to myself "Wait, this is just 'Holiday In Cambodia'. Isn't it?" Looked up "Holiday In Cambodia" for the first time in years, and wow, it's just "Holiday In Cambodia", almost note for note. I had no idea that one of the members was from The Dead Kennedys, and I'm not sure whether that makes it better or worse. 

This should be a fun one to finish. 

Sooo yeah I'm never listening to that one again. I don't hate it with the burning passion of a thousand suns, but man there are just so many things wrong with this one. To echo Vinny, Jello Biafra is straight up annoying on this record and the surface level lyricism is painful at times. The only thing I found interesting about the topics on this album is that literally nothing has changed in terms of societal and economic problems in America since 1990, but I already kind of knew that, to the point where most of the "gotcha" moments fall on deaf ears. The only one that got a chuckle out of me was the ending of "Drug Raid At 4am" but I doubt it'll work a second time. 

The rest of the album is filled with decent riffs that get run into the ground really quickly due to the Industrial Metal repetition, and the skits like "Can God Fill Teeth" are just absolutely silly, even though the overarching idea does hit the mark. After going through 7 tracks of not really caring for what I was listening to apart from a few moments in "Forkboy" and maybe "Bozo Skeleton", the last two tracks absolutely broke me as they're something that I never want to listen to ever again. "They're Coming To Take Me Away" could have been a decently weird track if it actually built up to something happening rather than slowly getting more and more insane until just ending in a fadeout. "I Am Your Clock" was excruciating to finish just due to its length. 

I don't think this is as heinous of a crime against music as Vinny says, but it's still pretty bad and silly. 

1.5/5

Well, initially, this wasn't quite as awful as I feared it might be. In fact, I gotta confess that I kind of enjoyed it up to Can God Fill Teeth? which is where things start to go horribly wrong. It's a silly and annoying track. Jello Biafra used to be much better than this, his humour was much more amusing and his societal critiques were biting, but this just sounds like the worst kind of dumbed down shit... until They're Coming to Take Me Away and it's eight and a half minutes of nonsense that make Can God feel like a classic. The closing fifteen minutes of I Am Your Clock is just boring and tedious and ultimately this is an album I can never see me returning to. If the first four tracks were released as an EP then I would have had much more time for it, but as it stands it's a release I can't get behind at all.

2/5

Wow! Some serious flack being dished out here gents! Thankfully I have a very different perspective to everyone else. I'd not previously spent any length of time with this record which drew my attention due to my having enjoyed the Lard tracks I've included in the monthly The Sphere playlists. I was wondering whether those songs would end up being the clear highlights from the band & that's likely the case however "The Last Temptation Of Reid" offered me a lot more than it has the rest of you. There's no doubt that it's a grower & I think the main reason for that is the thin production job which doesn't present the guitars in an up-front fashion & gives them a tone that's far more reminiscent of early 80's hardcore punk than it is of metal. But that's about the extent of the links to hardcore to tell you the truth with only the noticeably flat "Pineapple Face" showing any tendency to focus on the subgenre that made Jello Biafra so famous. The remainder of the album sits somewhere between industrial rock & industrial metal with a significant post-punk/goth rock influence showing through at times in exactly the same way as it did in Ministry's work of the time. In fact, the whole record sounds very much like Jello singing over the top of Ministry's "The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste" album to be perfectly honest (a record that I adore).

Jello's vocal delivery goes for pure unadulterated insanity & if you can't buy into that then you'll struggle with "The Last Temptation of Reid", particularly the end of the album which I honestly quite enjoy despite the fact that it's extended much further than it had any right to be. There's a drug-fueled cerebral aspect to this record that's very much a love-it-or-hate-it type of thing & I have to admit that I kinda dig it. I agree that "Can God Fill Teeth?" is a musical atrocity of the highest order however it's the only one I can identify here with opener "Forkboy" being a high-octane industrial metal classic by anyone's measure. Give this release a heavy industrial metal production job & most of it is competing with the big boys of the genre in my opinion. As it is though, it definitely comes across a poor man's Ministry with a psychotic dude ranting over the top. I'm just glad I gave it the time to open up a bit as it definitely has some value for an industrial rock/metal audience.

For fans of 1000 Homo DJs, "Broken"-era Nine Inch Nails & Ministry's "The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste" album.

3.5/5

In fact, the whole record sounds very much like Jello singing over the top of Ministry's "The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste" album to be perfectly honest (a record that I adore).

That was exactly my  thoughts when I initially heard the first four tracks and, as I said in my comments, I quite enjoyed that part of the album, along with Bozo Skeleton and Sylvestre Matuschka (a track about a 1930's Hungarian train bomber of all things!) The three more experimental tracks that take up half the album's runtime, however, left me cold as I am pathologically adverse to excessive experimentation and whilst I recognise it as my failing and not the musicians' fault, because of this I don't feel I could in truth score the album any higher. It's a pity too as DK are one of my favourite HC bands (along with Bad Brains and Minor Threat) and I am usually a huge fan of Jello's.

Daniel's comparison to Ministry definitely made it clearer as to why this didn't resonate with me at all, considering I don't think there's any room for the vocals to grow on me. I didn't care for The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste so coming into a record with similar instrumentals and a subjectively worse vocalist means there wasn't too much for me to enjoy on this one. Maybe I'll give it another shot towards the end of the month just for to give it a fair shot?