Wasteland Discotheque

I’ll be honest, I had never even heard of these guys before their recent inclusion in the archives, but I am glad that I stumbled across them. Based on what I’ve seen online, the band seems to be decently popular and this album, Wasteland Discotheque, contains most of their “hit” songs if Spotify is anything to go by. Shortly after the band was added I listened to this album out of curiosity and ended up being pretty surprised by its quality.

What we have here is a melodic death/groove metal album in the vein of bands such as The Unguided or mid-era In Flames, and it hits hard. The riffs are heavy and fluctuate between being groovy and melodic throughout the album's entire duration. There is lots of fast drumming and the harsh vocals have a lot of energy behind them. A lot of the lyrics on the album are about partying and picking up women and combined with the vocal delivery it gives the album sort of a rock n’ roll attitude that I don’t usually notice on a lot of metal albums. The vibe feels similar to Motorhead (not that the bands are even remotely similar musically). Overall though, the heavy parts of the music are exactly what one would expect from a good melodic death and groove metal, but there is more to the music on Wasteland Discotheque than just that.

Taking a look at the band's genre tag on this site, one will notice that Raunchy is an experimental band that draws influences from a variety of different genres, many of which are not metal. On Wasteland Discotheque, the band mostly plays metal in the style of what I described previously, but when you get to the choruses, alternative influences come into the music including catchy keyboards and clean singing, which both add a lot of melody and memorability to the songs. The choruses on this album are top notch all the way through and it isn't hard to see why songs like “Warriors” and “A Heavy Burden” have millions of plays on Spotify. Both of these songs are among my favorites on the album, but other standouts include the infectious “The Bash” and melodeath bangers like “Straight to Hell” and “To the Lighthouse”. Honestly, all the songs on here are pretty good though. If the alternative influences weren’t already obvious enough, the band also covered the hit Rockwell/Michael Jackson song “Somebody’s Watching Me” and turned it into a metal song, which is pretty cool as well.

Normally when I write reviews I talk about the line up and all of that fun stuff, but I’m going to cut it short here because I think I’ve said enough. If you like the aforementioned bands like The Unguided, albums like Clayman, or just like melodeath in general, I think it's a safe bet that you will dig this album, but If you are utterly repulsed by non-metal influences or catchiness in your metal, stay far away from Wasteland Discotheque (and this band in general).