Sure, some people will think of this as being a infantile attempt to appear humorous but grindcore fans know better. Here we have an album by Vila Real (Portugal) based quartet Serrabulho. They combine death metal and grindcore with cheerful, innocent fun and thus create 'happy grind'. Of course, with titles like 'Pornocchio', 'Buttman' and 'Happy Fornication' you quite know what you can expect. But allow me to guide you through the hilarious mess these guys have created.
'Pornocchio' opens with a well-known fun fair melody. In fact, in this household we always sing this melody whenever we fast forward the most boring part of the lives or our Sims. Yet, then the guitars, blastbeats and pig squeals come out to punish you for enjoying the intro. From there on the tone is set for forty five minutes of in-your-face riffs and fierce brutality, all tongue-in-cheek of course. You will probably survive the assault, but you will smell quite putrid afterwards.
Not that Serrabulho cares about how you smell. Worst case scenario: they will make a song about it. Stinking audience members are just another part of the fun, much like it's normal to break a limb at an Eat The Turnbuckle gig. Some of the songs are accompanied with humerous samples and dialogues, mostly based on some obsolete space exploring television series. Then a fierce, hardcore punk driven grind song once again hammers through your skull. My favorite one of these tunes, is 'Happy Fornication', I'm not going to tell you more about it, just listen.
The obligatory fart is present in 'Peidinho Ron Ron', which actually could be a decent Clawfinger meets Exploited song. 'Testicular Torsion' is probably the most 'normal' grindcore track on this album, driving on all the right elements to be taken seriously. But still, Serrabulho doesn't take things too serious. You might think there's an emotional ballad coming up coming up in 'Vaseline' but 'no, no, no', as Consuela would say. Yes, the humor is quite Family Guy like. 'Life Of A Penis', for instance, at first sounds like a bollywood techno tune before the grind kicks in again.
The album closes with 'Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs [Gang Bang Edition]' and I'm not even going to start writing about how it sounds. Just use your imagination and than make that ten times sicker. Yes, we're dealing with a novelty act here but fact remains that these guys can play decent extreme metal and will do so with great intensity and enthusiasm. Regardless of the aspect of infantile fun, this makes up for some serious moshpits and walls-of-death. So if you're into anything from Nanowar Of Steel, Excrementory Grindfuckers and, why not, Anal Cunt, you just might like this as much as I do...
(p.s. the end was a total surprise, I didn't even knew what was about to come in the last few minutes before I wrote the opening paragraph...)
Serge