Pheromones

Animal Alpha

I feel like saying, “About time I found another wrecking lady rock and roller. Sweet shit.” But I choose not to say that, because today I feel weary that I live in a world where it’s peculiar.

It’s not because I’m a feminist either. I tried to be a feminist. I don’t know how to be. I do know how to identify and speak out against unfair treatment, and the music industry seems to unfairly favor a certain type of person, thereby unfairly unfavoring a whole mess of other types of people.

That irritates me on a level of general fairness, and that’s what I have to say about that.

So I won’t say “About time I found another wrecking lady rock and roller.”

I shall, instead, say Wreck on, Agnete.

Fortunately, I can say that. Even though Animal Alpha disbanded, lead wrecker Agnete Kjølsrud went on to other projects. So that’s cool.

A few words on this album. First off, they’re a band of Norwegian wreckers, which right there suggests a pretty wrecking thing to me. Seems like the wrecking metal-makers from up Northern European way, by the time metal got to them, they had already absorbed a variety of other music. So far, I haven’t found many northern European metal-makers who sound like they just listened to Limp Bizkit for their teenage years and decided to do the same thing. They all sound like they do metal tempered by something else.

Animal Alpha sounds like they never got the memo about someTHING else. They went with somethingS, many times pluralized.

You know what this album sounds like? It sounds an awful lot like someone was running along with their record collection, and they fell down, and all the records broke. Then they gathered up the pieces and glued them into new records, because they couldn’t manage gluing the old records back together right. In this magical metaphor, this album sounds a lot like the records that would have resulted from that…if those new records got a good artistic hand applied to them before they got redistributed. It’s like one of those messes in the room of the artist who claims up and down that it’s all organized, even if you can’t see it, so please don’t touch anything, they’re working.

Last note: Anyone who knows me well, knows that my musical taste is pretty dull. Difficult to believe, I know.

In the name of my dull musical taste, you get two album recommendations for the low, low price of still nothing on this one. How about that?

Because I think that Pheromones here is a more musically interesting album… But I enjoy Animal Alpha’s other album better. Even though their other album isn’t “worse,” it’s more of a thrashing, noise-before-thought style. Pheromones is more art-before-noise by a touch.

Anyway, here’s their other album. The aptly named You Pay for the Whole Seat, but You’ll Only Need the Edge: