We Kill Everything

“We Kill Everything. Even our own careers”. – GWAR, probably after recording this ‘album’.


‘We Kill Everything’ is without a doubt, the worst thing GWAR has ever produced and will ever produce. This isn’t a secret either, as fans and the band alike admit their near unanimous disdain for the hour-long hearing impairment. So, it would only be appropriate that it be the end of an era for GWAR, the closing of Act 1, capping off the decade. It’s also clear that internal issues were having a drastic impact on the band’s ability to write and produce an album, or at least one that was better than ‘Carnival of Chaos’. No, ‘We Kill Everything’ is GWAR defaulting on their gross-out imagery, gimmickry, lunacy, and offensive humor to fill out an album in place of skill, technicality and competence. Though I wasn’t around firsthand, the album CRIPPLED GWAR due to how bad it was, a fact not forgotten as they refused to even acknowledge the train wreck, let alone play songs from it. This is GWAR lite, neutered and spayed, limp and feeble, ass thoroughly chapped.

Oh god, where do we begin? How about the songs? Yeah, most of everything here is terrible, poorly written, annoying trash. Even the tracks I like I’m willing to admit are bad with one exception: one survivor in this massacre of brain-cells. ‘A Short History’ is a downright epic metal journey, an instrumental tour de force that pulls the tightest performances out of everyone playing. It’s heavy, it’s clever, and it blows every track out of the water. And I can’t overstate how much that this isn’t a relative thing either, as it’s the ONE, COUNT FUCKING ONE, good track that is expertly written and executed. It’s almost painful to go to other tracks like ‘Nitro Burning Funny Bong’ or ‘Mary Anne’ which are trashy, insincere pop-punk timewasters. Sure, they’re fun spectacles, but it certainly doesn’t make them less annoying or recognizable as good songs. I also get the feeling that some of tracks are B-Side, unused ‘Toilet Earth’ songs or blatant ripoffs from ‘Ragnarok’. I’ll be damned if ‘Tune from Da Moon’ doesn’t ape ‘None but the Brave’ pretty fucking hard. Then you get tracks like ‘The Performer’ or ‘Fishfuck’, which are Ska influenced garbage that wouldn’t sound out of place in that atrocious Cat in the Hat movie. And this is just the first half of the album! Take my word for it that every other track on this album sucks in new and different ways. Hitting shuffle is like spinning the wheel of punishment with a single prize spot. The worst part is that these tracks last a fucking hour. At least ‘CoC’ had the decency to sprinkle good songs throughout it’s runtime, meanwhile listening to this is just a barrage of crap.

Oh, and the lyrics are the perfect complement to this punky, poppy pile of pus. If you thought GWAR was juvenile before, then you ain’t seen nothing yet! Toiler humor is the name of the game, and the constant jokes regarding asses, toilets, feces, bestiality, semen and pedophilia get old. Fast. Not only is it not funny, but it also isn’t memorable either. One great aspect of GWAR is the memorability and chant-ability of their songs. I can’t recite one line from this album despite just listening to it. Tangentially related to this is the lore of this album, which is also a great letdown. Each album has a sort of villain, or guest vocalist to add a sense of flare to it, while also providing contrast between them and their nefarious nemeses. Here we get Hunter Jackson’s, Scroda Moon…. A lifeless and bland character. His performance doesn’t help either, as it sounds like him talking with slight melody and a filter put over his voice. Speaking of performances, they also bite the big one. Everyone plays within their safe zone, bored out of their minds. There is not one performance that I can follow with persistent interest, in awe of what I’m hearing. This the energy and passion I expect to hear in a commercial jingle, not a GWAR album. The worst offender easily is Brockie. The man somehow channeled every annoying twang and pitch from the darkest pit of his soul, then unleashed it in the recording booth. Brockie’s vocal performance here is as much a nuisance as it is to anybody with ears. Funnily enough, the best track excludes vocals. HMMMM. It makes me wonder if they intended it to be an instrumental, or realized, “Oh Shit, this music actually kicks ass, tell Brockie the studio lost power today”.

Every other aspect of this album is unremarkable, if not passable. So that leaves what, the production and mix? The bass tone is nice, I guess. You can just tell after 3 songs, this album was made with the lowest amount of effort I’ve seen GWAR exert. Like going to the DMV, it feels like the album was made from a scornful obligation: a quota of forced and painful silliness. Hell, Brockie admits at the very end of the last track that he isn’t willing to spend more time on the song. Was that the motto going into this travesty, or was it cynical trait picked up along the way? Either way, it’s still an hour I’m never getting back. With unfunny songs, poor writing, bare bones performances, annoying vocals, uninteresting ideas, forgettable lore/characters and an hour long run time, you’d BEG to back to ‘CoC’. Though I must thank this spasm in one regard. It KILLED any further punk heavy, bare minimum mentality going forward and was a catalyst for the second act of GWAR. Though that’s like thanking a murderer for accidentally saving you, when he was trying to y’know, kill you. Regardless, this album sucks. I’m not willing to work on this review any longer.

We Kill Everything is the be-all end-all of GWAR albums. It is the fundamental sound of the band, all of their ideas and eccentricities, taken to what must be considered their logical extreme. Within are the band’s most outrageous, perverse, offensive tunes (“Babyraper,” “Fuckin’ an Animal”) and conversely their most immature toilet-humor (“Jiggle the Handle,” “The Master has a Butt”). Some of the band’s most metal moments are contained (“Jagermonsta,” “A Short History of the End of the World”) as well as their punkiest (“Nitro Burnin’ Funny Bong,” “FishFuck”). There’s great moments and horrendously awful novelty moments, just like similar ones released over their first decade of activity. It’s like a retrospective compilation, but with all new songs.

Despite the extremely divergent material on this especially inconsistent GWAR album, there’s some kind of mini storyline incorporated into the meat of the album which leads me to believe that this was at one time meant to be the final GWAR release. This kind of explains the “career summary” approach to songwriting here. And really, some of this stuff is pretty awesome, but holy feces is some of it retarded. “My Girly Ways” is like a lost Kittie track, Slymenstra needing less vocal contributions rather than more. “The Master has a Butt” is a parody of pop country and is about as horrible as you can probably imagine. And if that was hard to believe, “Mary Anne” is straight up, watered down, pop fucking punk garbage. It doesn’t get worse than these few, but man, it doesn’t get much better either. Some of the more flaccid tunes only get some value in context of the hilarious music video that was made for them. Check out “Fuckin’ an Animal,” which reduced me to tears the first time I saw it on the Ultimate GWAR Video Archive. Man, that’s an awesome collection by the way, I laughed my ass off the whole time and…oh shit, we’re still doing this album review. Wish I was doing that video review, most of this stuff is hard to listen to.

It’s a shame too, because you get an instrumental tour de force like “A Short History” buried in between all this cheery novelty shit. The best thing about this album is the fact that, having blown their wads on this convoluted joke, the band would settle down a bit and craft their first really vicious album in over a decade. This, however, remains one of their worst overall efforts and should be overlooked in favor of almost any one of the others.