Fury and Fear, Flesh and Bone

The long-running side project of Abigail member Yasuyuki Suzuki, Barbatos seems like a more serious crusty thrash limb than the main body. With a similarly complicated discography to Abigail, it's no surprise that Fury and Fear, Flesh and Bone isn't a simple full-length but rather a compilation of sorts that groups together three separate recordings from 2004 and 2000, all at slightly different levels of quality and featuring different guest musicians. Many of the songs had already featured on earlier Barbatos albums, so this is certainly not the place to go if you dislike bands recycling material. All the tracks feature Youhei (also of Abigail), but Chuck Keller of Ares Kingdom and Joel Grind of Toxic Holocaust turn up to contribute vocals and some instruments to five tracks each. The remainder, at the close of the disc, were originally recorded for the Bloody Fucking War demo and feature Suzuki's own vocals.

Frankly, it's very useful for me as a reviewer that Toxic Holocaust's mainman turns up here because Barbatos do a good job of sounding more or less like you'd expect from the description "lo-fi Toxic Holocaust", which (if you think about it) was exactly what Toxic Holocaust was until...about the same time as this album! So being together makes perfect sense! However, I'm not as lazy as you think, so a more accurate picture would be to say that this is thrash metal played from the perspective of punks who happen to be in favour of nuclear war rather than against it and want to play guitar solos. For some reason, all the Japanese bands in the scene also seem to be drunk all the time and worship Sodom's debut EP, so looseness is the order of the day in playing techniques, while a bit of d-beat gets thrown into the drumming performance instead of double kick or something more commonly found in thrash. Of the songs recorded for this release, Keller's portion of the album features more of the Sodom influence and is truer to the character of thrash riffing too, while Grind's songs are a perplexing mixture of bad Engrish and fast punk riffing that end up very humorous indeed. Regarding the demo portion, black metal rears its ugliest head as Suzuki's tortured vocals scream out unknown lyrics over loose, bass-heavy thrash that sounds as if Hellhammer had been playing on repeat for at least a few days prior.

I really need a moment to tell you about the lyrics of Grind's songs, because they are fucking slaying me right now. Of course, the lyrics were already written before he came along, but you would have thought that he's tidy them up a little. You don't even need to worry about the randomness of having serious titles like 'Prophecy of the Evening Star' and 'All for the Son of Heaven' rubbing shoulders with 'I Love to Eat Pussy' and 'Satanik Beer', because they are nothing compared to the poetry found in 'Blond Hair and Bitch!' and especially 'Dick Is Fucking Big'. For this latter song, I can sort of understand the reason for shouting out the title a lot though I'm not quite clear on the meaning of "Fuck off shaving pussy", since that seems to be saying either "Don't shave your pussy" or that the girl whose genitalia is in question should vacate the immediate area post-haste, neither of which accord with the general thrust of the song. Anyway, it's repeated 12 times, so it must mean something. However, it's the presence of two verses that I'm hoping to share, the first of which somehow conflates the concept of getting a blowjob with ridding the world of fake metal, as seen below:

Put it in bitch mouth
It will makes you to ill
Sexual metal holocaust will
Crush poser gay!

The second is an example of pure poetry, meaning this will surely be the song that comes to mind when thinking about "spicy pussy":

I will please entry anus
Oh my god! Give me spicy pussy
Pussy is good smell
Shit is bad smell

Take a bow gentlemen, take a bow! What upstanding members of the male species you are.

As a result of this kind of thing, you can understand why I'm reluctant to say that Keller's tracks are definitively better than the rest, since if we only listened to the better-produced, better-composed songs that feature better riffs we would miss out on those lyrics. In any case, you've got to have fun with Fury and Fear, Flesh and Bone because the recycled songs and mixed styles during its length, as well as the general homogeneity of each section of the release leaves it without a great deal of basic appeal. There are decent songs here, but you'd do better to check out Rocking Metal Motherfucker or a different full-length before delving into this one.


-- May Diamhea's feat of 100 reviews in 7 days remain unbeaten --