Wormfood - France
Code666 – CODE031 - 18/11/2005
By Sam Brokenshaw
It's always a pleasant surprise when you really don't know where to start when thinking about a new record.
Wormfood's first album for
Code666, "
France," sits firmly in this intellectual quandary...then urinates all over your brain whilst gleefully skipping between as many genres as
Carnival in Coal at their finest. "
France" is quite firmly a metal album, it has all the expected trappings of such; brutal drums, doomy riffs, screams and so forth. However, in the space between the metal sections Wormfood go delightfully bonkers, their music resembling a wall having been attacked by a bunch of deranged graffiti artists.
The subject matter here veers all over the place, from the grotesque comedy intro to the disturbing "
Vieux Pedophile." The latter track is actually one of the few songs I've heard this year that I felt genuinely threatened by, it's dark and macabre portrayal of an incestuous father genuinely frays nerves and unsettles the listener. Elsewhere the album mixes up doom, goth, dark pop, thrash and just about any metal genre you'd care to think of. Vocalist El Worm certainly has a variety of voices and a great range and takes advantage of this, never letting the vocals sit in one place and stagnate. Elsewhere we have moments of accordion melody, gang vocals, orchestral swells and goodness only knows what else. The album is captured in all it's obscene glory by Axel Wurthorn of fellow French psychiatric ward escapees
Carnival in Coal, admirably never letting down the freakish blend of elements.
Overall, if you like your metal pure and plain metallic, you're going to be very,
very scared by this album. If, however, you like bands that venture outside the box and push the envelope, you'll be in heaven. Like so many bands on the Code666 label and the now sadly defunct Elitist Records,
Wormfood smash musical boundaries and then gleefully desecrate their final resting places. Viva la France!
9/10
Wormfood's Official Website
Code666 Official Website
