Zeigenbock Kopf
Nocturnal Submissions
(Tigerbeat6 Records)
If you don't enjoy throbbing beats and wicked high end drenched in feedback, you most likely won't enjoy Zeigenbock Kopf. A hyper-homo trio from Germany, imagine Pansy Division rocking the electro-industrial beats instead of the pop-punk edge, and you're getting closer to their sound. Also, toss aside the slightly goofy manner and instead insert a slightly evil edge, one that crams both overtly sexual and aggresively creepy into one dirty mash.
Really, though, that's the M.O. of the group, and they let you know that straight away with track titles like "Sex With A Man," "Leather Gloves" and others. It's the former track that opens the disc up, and the beat sounds like it's being played through a subwoofer that has been shredded from years of abuse while a gritty, grimey bassline warbles through the whole thing and high-end organ stabs punctuate lyrics that are also filtered into a cold edge. Although it sounds like sort of a swarming mess, there's something catchy and relentless about it, and that trend continues with "This Bass Is Too Loud," which is basically just another slight twist on the same variation musically.
Basically, the album boils down to almost a single premise, and that is whether or not the listener enjoys a bit of musical masochism. "Hunter, Killer" pounds relentlessly for it's entirety, and "Death In Disguise" keeps things hammering along with fuzzy beats and muffled basslines and squeaks. As one of the aforementioned songs states in the lyrics, "the bass is too loud, the treble is too high," but there's still slightly catchy about it, which mainly boils down to the relentless energy that the album rumbles forward with. Even when they slow down the BPM a little bit (such as on tracks like "Bobby By My Side"), it just ups the creepy factor even more (especially given the more ambiguous lyrical content in comparison to the more straightforward homo-core of the remainder of the disc).
At times simply way too over-the-top for its own good ("Get Your Dicks In The Mix"), the trio at least knows their limits somewhat by limiting the disc to just over 30 minutes over the course of 13 tracks. Arriving on Kid 606's Tigerbeat6 Records, I'm still not sure whether it's some sort of pseudo-industrial in-joke or not, but it's good for a quick blast of dirty fun if you can put up with it all.
Rating: 6
