The Road Behind

...so you don't have to. A rare EP from the masters of masturbation, the almighty GWAR, The Road Behind is a lost little rarity in the sea of Slave Pit fan club releases that are absolute hell to track down and collect these days. Not all of them are worth the effort and I hope anyone reading this review does not invest much time or money in trying to get it: the main single is readily available and all the obscure recordings fucking suck.

“The Road Behind” is the key track here, the band’s elaborate piss-take on rock’s obligatory ‘power ballad.’ Strangely, it seems half serious…my ears might be burnt out, but I swear that the vocal takes (not just Oderus singing here) are done convincingly. Who’d have thought it? Musically the mood’s the same, the silly whistling at the beginning meant to elicit comparisons to the Guns and Roses hit “Patience” I’m sure, but otherwise reasonably performed. This considered, the song still duly earns its place in the GWAR catalog thanks to some jocund lyrical lampooning. “I signed a million dollar contract, I puked on every page.” Because signing in your own blood is rather passé these days, don’t you agree? The ballad format starts to grate on repeated listens, but the lyrics manage to be funny every time.

The rest, the rarities, are a miserable fucking cock-tease. Two of the six tracks, “Overture in N Minor” and “Voodoo Summoning” are indiscernible noise, “Krak Down” is the inferior AMBD version of an already inferior leftover song (thirty seconds in and you’ll be a skippin’ it), and as for the live tracks, “Captain Crunch” is actually worse than the studio version from Hell-O and “Have You Seen Me?” is dragged out to a painful, gory death with excessive “stage banter”. Are these even live tracks? The audience noise sounds rather unconvincing to me and I wouldn’t put it past these guys to pull a little hoax of this sort. Live from Antarctica anybody?

Real disappointing if you thought you were getting some exclusive content, the reason this was printed in the first place is sort of a mystery to me. Leave it behind.