Collection Prestige

To get an idea of how much this album is abominable, just think even St. Anger may be better. Why? St. Anger is, at least, coherent. From the beginning to the end it consists in tin-can drums, screaming nu-metal vocals, breakdowns and the rest, but it’s nonetheless consistent in mediocrity. Collection Prestige on the contrary isn’t only overall awful but messy and incoherent. Listening to it, if you can, you’ll find bits of pop music, crappy goth rock, industrial sounds or parts that don’t belong to any particular genre just because they can’t be considered as music to begin with; actually everything but metal. But you know, who still cares for metal except a bunch of elitists at this infamous place known as metal-archives.com?

Now if you still want to put a label on this overall negation of any form of music, just call it nu-metal. It shows vulgar screaming vocals with loads of hardcore and rap influences, awfully programmed drums sounding most of time like kitchenware, combined to a huge amount of electronics and distorted sounds. In fact, this album perfectly incarnates the general idea the layman gets of “extreme” music: a wall of noise – noise at the negative sense, I’m not speaking about Merzbow here – devoid from any structure or melody, topped by some barking moron. What is the “extreme” band by essence? Slipknot, good sir. Just listen to the beginning of the second, third or fourth track – actually, the list could go on... – doesn’t it sound exactly like Slipknot? Well, you got it. Without mentioning the track titles perfectly complete the picture: “Fuckable”, “Ohlala”, or a song about downloading? Are these guys serious?

The answer is, no. They just can’t be. The proof? “You’re listening to Right Click... Save As from the new Carnival in Coal album called Collection Prestige, enjoy it with your friends”, etc. That’s exactly the kind of joke Pete Steele is familiar with (remember... “Thank you for having bought our new recording of October Rust, we’ve spent six months getting high and recording it...” and that was already ten years ago) with the difference that in TON case, after two minutes of joking you got around one hour of genuine music, while in Carnival in Coal case the joke never seems to end. Lyrics are, from the beginning to the end, stupid. The music itself, when there is some to be found (what is pretty rare), often sounds like parody: the high-pitched shrieks in Satanic Disaster for instance are an obvious Dani Filth impersonation, while another part in Delivery Day will sound like a prog rock caricature, and so on. And, of course, there’s this omnipresent hardcore/nu-metal background without, once again, any logic. Indeed, they definitely can’t have written their songs before recording them.

The most surprising is, in spite of all those disparate elements, all tracks more or less sound the same, as odd as it could seem. Just because all said elements are present in every track, where they melt in the same indefinable mud one would be in pain paying real attention to. Listening to the whole album, even as background music, is already a challenge. The only songs sounding a tad distinct are the pop-goth ballad Cartilage Holocaust (a very poor clone of The Sisters of Mercy, minus the talent), the slower D.O.A (for... Drunk Once Again. wov) as well as this useless random piano conclusion Promenade, but as they’re all equally pitiful, no one will give a fuck for them. At least they exhibit less nu-metal shit than the rest of the album, poor consolation.

The funniest fact here is some called this collection (to echo the title...) of mallcore-influenced nonsense avant-garde metal. It’s incoherent, so it must be intellectual, right? It’s noisy, so it must be metal, right, right? Allright, metal it’s definitely not, but it may still be avant-garde. Exactly like this work I saw last day in that contemporary art exhibition, where chalks were given to visitors so that they could write anything they wanted on it. Please don’t tell me this was art. Please don’t tell me Carnival in Coal is art. Please don’t tell me Slipknot is art.

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