Vomit on the Rabbi

I honestly do not know where to start with Xenophobia's demo, Vomit on the Rabbi. It is an all around terrible demo. I am surprised that they even got themselves signed after this. However, I am glad they did, as Xenophobia have produced some good material in their later years.

Well, I guess the best place to start would be the terrible production. It is so bad that it isn't even cold or raw sounding. It is simply empty. I can faintly hear some interesting music, but for the most part, it is impossible to hear anything on Vomit on the Rabbi. The biggest production flaw is the lack of volume. It sounds like they are playing really loud, but from a couple miles away. It is almost like Vomit on the Rabbi is made of background noise. But there is a twist! The music is in the background, the noise is in the foreground.

The drumming on Vomit on the Rabbi is an absolute joke. He is essentially randomly hitting the drums, to create an "atmosphere" of "aggression. In all honesty, the actual level of aggression, or atmosphere, for that matter, is relatively low. It is like a bunch of guys fucking around the the garage with crappy amplifiers and tin cans.

The guitar playing on Vomit on the Rabbi may in fact be the one area where musical proficiency is shown. There are some solid riffs on this release. They are, however, very hard to hear, due to the shitty production, and oddly terrible guitar tone. The guitar sounds like it is practically clean, and has no energy behind it. Somehow, feedback is happening, even with little distortion. It sounds like Vomit on the Rabbi is playing some sort of evil mind trick where it creates an extreme amount of noise with a weak amount of distortion

There is a lot of shitty black metal out there, but nothing sounds worse than this. I actually did not know that anything could even sound this bad. Even my one man bedroom band recording on a kindle fire sounds better than this. Vomit on the Rabbi may or may not have good music. I honestly cannot tell.

“Fail: To come short or be wanting in action, detail, or result; disappoint or prove lacking in what is attempted, expected, desired or approved.”

That’s the Third Edition of the Macquarie Dictionary defines as fail and holy flying crap balls Batman this demo displays a hell of a lot of it! Apparently their full length album is a decent to good slab of NSBM, but judging by this demo, one would assume the full length is a piece of duck shit. Really, this is horrible. I could leave it there, but I’ll elaborate, because there’s certainly enough reasons why this should never be listened to except maybe for those who are interested in Xenophobia’s beginning, or merely intrigued by the overtly NS themes on display here.

Now, I’ve heard rawer material than this, but damn does this sound awful! Drums are buried for the majority of the time, and when they do finally appear, you realise that it may have been possible that hiding the drums was a deliberate choice Xenophobia made when recording this. Why? Because the drumming here is suckage. Really, it is horrible. I’m sure the drummer was thinking, “Hey, I’ll do blast beats here! I can’t do them for shit, but I’ll record it anyway!”. Seriously, just tune out of the drumming. Listening to the rhythm that the drumming provides actually makes this demo WORSE. Yes, worse.

Maybe, with they drown out the drumming for other reasons though? Transilivanian Hunger’s drumming was barely audible, allowing the magnificent, ice cold riffage make one hell of an album. Well, Xenophobia obviously haven’t realised you need at least half decent riffs to make any black metal worth anything. Throughout the whole demo, there is precisely, count ‘em, TWO good riffs. Only two, no more. One is about nine minutes into “Komie Skum” (wow, you guys have replaced C’s with K’s, how original!), hey that’s not a bad riff! Too bad you have to put up with another twelve and a half minutes of garbage during that song. The other good riff is at the start of “Thousand Lies”. Maybe it could give good expectations to the listener, opening the demo with the best riff out of the lot. Who knows, all I know is that the rest is pure shit. Most of the guitar riffs simply can’t be heard because they lack any distinction. It’s all generic, poorly played and shitty sounding horse faeces.

Anybody reading this review has already seen the title of the demo, “Vomit on the Rabbi”. Just by reading that, as well as the song titles, leads even the most brain dead person to the conclusion that the lyrics are the worst kind of NS lyrics. Now I have nothing against National Socialism and its musical following, but please, so many NSBM bands can at least write thought provoking lyrics that actually force the listening to consider the ideology behind the music. Bad lyrics can be forgiven is there is some passion and conviction in the delivery of them, but this is just another area where Xenophobia fails. Monotonous, boring, dull, cruddy, all these words describe the vocals here. It’s like someone took Malefic out of the shower after a Xasthur recording session, got him stoned and told him to use his most likely sore throat to scream poor lyrics. Seriously, it’s just rubbish. And then there’s the moments on Komie Skum where Warhead Jewgrinder (creativity to the max d00dz!) decides that it is cool (kool?) to scream over the top of every instrument.

So, how to the tracks stack up?
The intro – Boom, explosions, adds nothing at all. Heck, even the intro is stupidly distorted.
Thousand Lies – One good riff. The rest is shit. Next track please.
Fiery Cross (Aryan) – Wow, go back to the last track, this is even worse. It’s pretty much the same as Thousand Lies except with twinkly attempts at acoustic guitar induced atmosphere. Next track!
Untitled – This track sucks hard, maybe that’s why they decided to leave it untitled? Thousand Lies, but no good riff. Again.
Komie Skum – Oh Satan save me, when will it end? The untitled track for thirteen minutes! If I was made of butter, Komie Skum would be a hot butter knife. It’s cutting me, but that doesn’t mean it’s sharp. You see, dung is usually warm when it leaves the body, catching my drift? Get the butter reference now?

So, in conclusion, never pay ANYTHING for this, I wish I never wasted the 20 or so megabytes of my download limit on this. Stay away, far away, because that’s the best place to be when this demo is being played. One percent for the amount of time the two decent riffs take up. I’m running out of words for “shit” and I don’t have a thesaurus handy, so I’m going to have to end this review with quite a childish word.

This is poop.