Artist: Super Happy Story Time Land (US) Album: Super Happy Story Time Land (2010) Genre: Death Metal, Deathcore On occasion we’ll get an album or artist righteously called batshit crazy. Fucked up as a door nail. Mental beyond all recognition. Rather frequently we write about bands that are brutal. Louder than a jackhammer in a techno-bar, listening to which you’re lucky if your ears start bleeding and unlucky if your cerebral mass blows out through your nose and eye sockets. These bands often take themselves rather seriously. Most bands do that, actually.

Today’s combination of nuts in 256 colors and brutal at butt-grinding levels is an absolute rarity. And, though you might not expect it, it works like a charm. Super Happy Story Time Land – to be called SHSTL from now on – is an American band of four that has released its self-titled debut record in early 2010. I had it brought under my attention the other day, and though there’s a slim chance that I might be so heavily enjoying this due to my Metal-deprived, but otherwise very lovely vacation of two weeks, I’m quite convinced this shit is just shit fuck awesome.

In the off chance you’re from Planet Brainfucked – if you’re not, you’ll have figured this out by yourself already – the fact that SHSTL is batshit crazy is quite evident from its band name: Super Happy Story Time Land. I was fuckin’ expecting Sesame Street songs about the alphabet, the number 1 to 20 and about happy things, like playing, fruit, pets and sniffing glue. Instead I get some delicious ‘Cory’ Death Metal brutality. Imagine my surprise.

That got bigger when I read through the list of the album’s song titles. A sample: I Wanna Be a Dinosaur, Please & Thank You, Fishing with Dad, Bearstronauts II. Seems like Will Armacost (drums), Ryan Fontana (guitars), Mario Hefledinger (vocals) and Aaron Williams (bass) somehow got lyrically stuck in the time when they listened to vacation-pack kiddie tapes in the back of the car on their way to the holiday destination. Luckily the music hasn’t.

That has matured a lot since their days of listening to soft jazzy pop tunes about pickle pie, doing the laundry and a guy named Bob with a bad memory. At least that was the stuff that drove my dad to run the car into the traffic barriers on both sides of the road on the way to Southern France when I was still sucking juice from a teat. Their music is properly noisy, containing big chugging riffs, bucketloads of percussion violence and a screamy dude. They tend to bring it loud, to a point where babies die from instant brain damage.

But, the nutty chap who empties the garbage bins at your local supermarket is never far away, happy to fire off a load of hilarity. Listening front to back, SHSTL’s debut contains a lot of “intermissions” of sweet snazzy Jazz stuff, teachers discussion with their 5-year old class what they want to be when they grow up, Titanic theme songs, and fuck knows what else you can make up when you’re stoned on weed and mushrooms, while hanging upside down from the ceiling and drunk on absinth. The effect: it cracks me the fuck up!

But, just not so much that it becomes more of a stand-up comedy show than a Metal album. The band manages to tread the edge brilliantly, right there on the peak of the combination. The result is some Brutal Metal that for once doesn’t make you want to shoot yourself through the mouth. Or, some comedy pleasantly supported by fuckloads of Metal. Whichever way you look at this, it gets you grinning like a circus clown. You’ll look even more fucked up than you already are, but you’ll be having a good time!

Let I Wanna Be a Dinosaur be a testament to that!

My Grade: 8.5/10
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Tags: American, brutal, death, deathcore, review

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 4th, 2011 at 8:00 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.