Oh my goodness gracious!

Look, I like metalcore as much as the next guy. I own Linda Rondstat’s Heart Like A Wheel and nothing gets me more pumped than Journey’s “Open Arms” from the – you guessed it, fellow metalheads – Heavy Metal soundtrack.

So when the band Every Time I Die contacted me about reviewing their newest album, Ex Lives, I was very excited. If only for a chance to add some new songs to the “speedwalking playlist” on my iPod (you can only listen to Vanessa Carlton’s “A Thousand Miles” so many times, no matter how awesome it is!). They sent me the CD a week ago. I listened to it, and have finally collected my thoughts.

For some reason, the band decided not to record the album in a studio, but rather on a demolitions testing sight where 900 Samoan women were given PCP and told to fuck goats over the sound of concrete being jackhammered. This is not a criticism – the metal-on-stone/goat ejaculating mix creates a mulchy, corpse-rich sonic soil on which the band builds its pulverizing guitar and drums attack. I say “pulverizing” because when I was halfway through the first track – the crazy-man-on-a-corner demon gospel rave-up “Underwater Bimbos from Outer Space” – I hit my scrotum with a rolling pin several times. I can’t remember now why I did it. Maybe it was Keith Buckley’s repeated howling of, “I want to be dead with my friends”, which is what I say before I eat pancakes.

Which is a pretty accurate way to describe this album, as a whole – screamed despair over a genuine stack of sweetness. For all their fury over the “devil’s blood” in “Typical Miracle”, the band is still polite enough to say, “Thanks, Lord…” before refusing any help from him on “Revival Mode.”

The guitar assault is delivered by Keith’s brother Jordan and Andy Williams (not the wonderful crooner who sang “Moon River”, but a younger guy; I checked). If Tetsuo, the Iron Man ever wrote lullabies, they’d sound a lot like the guitars on Ex Lives. The drums, by Ryan Ledger, are as urgent as GG Allin’s revived corpse, pounding its way out of a crypt.

Also, make sure you get the deluxe edition, so you get the bonus track “Business Casualty.” After listening to it twenty times, I finally got the courage to forgive Sylvester Stallone for Rhinestone.

On my Good News About Fred Durst Scale (a “1” being “Fred Gets A Slight Hangnail”) I give Ex Lives a “5” – or “Fred Durst Drowns in Nancy Grace’s Diarrhea.”