Annoyingly in the good way! Today we’ll focus our attention to a band that I’ve heard of numerous times before, but which I could never be arsed to look into. Never thought I’d like them. The reason is their name: Raunchy. It just sounds cheesy and raunchy, and fit for a shitty alternative Rock band intending to score cheaply, instead of aiming to make good music. In fact, judging from the few songs that I’ve heard of their previous releases, that may just be what they’ve been.

So I guess part of that name association I made is true: Raunchy doesn’t make the most complex sort of music, but in all fairness – and I hate to admit it – their latest album doesn’t seem to be bad. From what I’ve heard, it’s like a mixture of Mnemic’s mechanical Industrial Metal tunes with some heavy Rock spiced up with a synth job. Features harsh vocals, but also a lot of cleanly sung parts. Wearing my moderate Industrial hat today, I can actually quite enjoy it, despite that I know it’s actually a bit wrong and I’m not supposed to like clean vocals. The Gods of Metal forbid it. Well, I guess I don’t take shit from no one, even if I know for once I should!

What I didn’t know about this band is that they are actually already quite old; the band formed up in 1992 in Denmark. Their first studio record didn’t come out until 2001, but in the years to follow they upped the release pace a bit. Last October they released their fifth studio album, titled A Discord Electric. I’m sure I wouldn’t have known if it wasn’t for Death Metal Baboon Radio, which randomly plays all tracks found on the album, excepting the Japanese bonus track. Well fuck that Japanese bonus track! It’s a remix of one of the album’s other tracks anyway, and so the Japs just got screwed over with their bonus.

I bumped into a song named Blueprints for Lost Souls and it’s the one I’ll be focusing on, for the sole fuckin’ reason that it features cowboy-style mouth harmonica over thick Metal riffs in the intro. Seriously, do you know of any other band that has tried that?! It’s pretty fuckin’ Metal isn’t it?! The harmonica spells tension, it’s up to no good, and together with the guitars it sets a nice mechanical Steampunk-like setting for the song.

The song isn’t Metal through and through though, as it occasionally switches to stretched cleanly-sung choruses. No biggie though, as the alternation with pummeling loud low-tuned riffs keeps the balance on the right side of the score. With nearly six minutes of playing time the song is quite a long one, but the variation described manages to keep it interesting front to end.

To soak in the song yourself, just click on the following fuckin’ link to listen to the track on Death Metal Baboon Radio. Mind you, once the song ends it’ll continue playing other material, from other bands, that is featured on our station. There’s a lot of quality material there, I tell ya, so you run the risk of sticking around a bit!

To illustrate what we meant by how “wrong” they’ve been in the past, we’ll also feed you a music video for a track named Warriors, which is found on their 2008 release Wasteland Discotheque. I just think it’s excessively cheesy, sweaty camembert-like, but I still have to admit that there are parts of it I fuckin’ dig. Thankfully they are the harsh parts – or I would have had to call myself a fag from now on – but still, it’s surprising (and also heavily confronting) to learn how “wrong music” can actually be quite entertaining. Running the risk of forever losing you to cheesy music, here’s that song.

Raunchy maintains its official website here. Not the most well-arranged website of websites, but you can easily find the links to all their other official pages there if you need to. Alright, we’re off to buy a pink skirt now.

Tags: Danish, death, industrial, melodeath, melodic

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 24th, 2011 at 8:32 am and is filed under Music Posts. 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.