Review: Stolen Babies - There Be Squabbles Ahead

WOT TEH HEEL ARE J00 DOING REVEWING STUFFZ IN ENGLEESH?

Well you see, during the review of swamp man yesterday I got really bored with just sticking to music in one language and hearing music that sounds all alike. I was talking with a friend about it and she suggested that I should try to review a band I'm completely unfamiliar with in a language I don't normally listen to. I remembered this band from a few months back when she showed me and I listened a few times and I didn't know what to think. I said I would get back to her and tell her what I think of it.

And then as I was about to bring up this band and ask her what she thought, she brought up this band and requested that I do it. So, here you and I go on a trip through this demented circus...

1. "Spill!" – 3:21
2. "Awful Fall" – 3:44
3. "Filistata" – 3:17
4. "A Year of Judges" – 3:20
5. "So Close" – 4:21
6. "Tablescrap" – 3:54
7. "Swint? or Slude?" – 2:16
8. "Mind Your Eyes" – 4:04
9. "Lifeless" – 5:56
10. "Tall Tales" – 3:41
11. "Push Button" – 4:07
12. "Gathering Fingers" – 5:20
13. "The Button Has Been Pushed" – 1:45

Holy hell, almost every cover I can find these days has the face of some multimillionaire faggot with a face full of botox grinning at me in some sheepish, "hand me your money" fashion. With a cover that looks like something Tim Burton scribbled on a notepad in his sleep, Stolen Babies should immediately come off as a band that isn't normal.

They aren't.

Music has become so stale and mainstream all over I was falling into a rut of "This melody follows a progressive 5/4 pattern while curtailing any strain of originality in the rest of the package", or "The album jacket looks awfully standard and boring and reminiscent of the album sitting next to it in my media player", or "These zomboidic pentatonic lyrics are grating on my eardrums and provide no intellectual stimulation".

I am here to tell you this has to be one of the most refreshing trips through music I have ever taken. No matter how much metal you may think you know, or how much you think you know what avant-garde music sounds like, you cannot immunize yourself for this album. There's some thick bass, accordion, bone-crushing guitar, glockenspiel, jaw harp, tuba, what sounds like seven different types of drums, and violins all wrapped around a package of amelodic rhythms, dark atmospheres, sharp contrasts, and a vocalist dressed like Harley Quinn. Said vocalist, who has to be one of the hottest front women in the metal scene, alternates between pop singing, black metal screaming, Broadway-esque vocals, screeching, and sounding like something from Satan's toilet.

If Kyo had a vagina and was hot, he would be her.

In the hands of any other musician, which most likely means any incapable person who holds a guitar backwards and calls himself competent, such a mélange would cause you to immediately dismiss the album as "alienating trash" and force you to sprint back to your cookie-cutter staple artists. In the hands of Stolen Babies, they concoct a 40 minute piece of work that does a superb job at scaring the hell out of anyone not ready for it. Many review sites will tell you that it's going to take you a few spins through this album in order to "get it".

I "got it" in one.

A track-by-track analysis is impossible for this album because it was put together with meticulous care. Stolen Babies intended for you to sit down with album in hand and listen from the first jarring notes of Spill! to the almost inaudible mumbling that ends off The Button Has Been Pushed. All the parts of this album are so melodically off and so purposefully eccentric that if you pick one and try to use that one song as a comparison to the rest of the album you will fail miserably. Songs like Push Button and Lifeless are things that you might want to play for your friends to get them interested in Stolen Babies because it's as "commercial" as this album gets (which means it just toes the line of musical sanity) but sound nothing like Mind Your Eyes, Gathering Fingers, and Awful Fall.

Hell, this band even destroys the normal conventions of a track list that many bands exploit in order to make some quick cash. Although devoid of an opening instrumental, Swint? or Slude? has to be one of the most creative instrumentals ever placed on an album and shows a large degree of thought. Instead of programming some lame electronic beats or sampling some piss out of the piano cooler they go ahead with something I can only describe as the circus orchestra. I could live without the last track but it's among the more creative in the line of album endings. Neither one of those two manage to screw up the quirky pace of this album in the slightest. When a band can take something standard and flip it on it's head and make you wonder why it sounds so different, they've made music.

This is the section where I would normally give you recommendations as to what to listen to but I cannot in this particular instance. There Be Squabbles Ahead sounds like a ride through a demented circus and at the end of the journey I can assure you one of two things: you'll press play all over again or you'll be running away from this faster than the kids on the jacket. There is no in between. You will either love or hate this band but I can guarantee you that you haven't heard the extremes of music until you've given this a try or six.

Score: 90%