By Taylor Long
Today, the occurrence of the members of one band having multiple side projects is becoming common practice. With Kill Sadie, members of These Arms Are Snakes, Minus The Bear, Pretty Girls Make Graves and formerly of Botch seem to have had as many bands as Zsa Zsa Gabor has husbands.
However, since those four bands have different sounds, Kill Sadie isn’t a carbon copy of music that’s already been made. Instead, if you took the math rock sounds of Minus The Bear, the pounding guitars of Botch and the vocals of These Arms Are Snakes, and put them into a blender, Kill Sadie is exactly what you’d get. A new genre called mathcore?! Perhaps…
The sophomore album from this (now temporarily deceased) super side project, We’re All A Little Sick is composed of three new tracks, a remix and four re-mastered demos. It’s full of weirdly compelling sounds that make the listener think “what the…!” while simultaneously reaching for the back button.
On “Untitled Number 304,” for instance, the music is inspired by Minus The Bear, while the vocals sound as though they were being shouted from across the room. The music stops, leaving just the shouted vocals, then resumes again.
The songs follow no formula, with some tracks being heavy with vocals, and one track being fully instrumental. Some songs seem to go on for one third the album, while others seem to end after a few toe taps. “Song 3” resembles electronica, while “The Ivy League Donors (Prescription Epidemic)” sounds like something a (good) Long Island Hardcore band could pull off. Lack of diversity in this album, there is not.
Perhaps the only downfall of We’re All A Little Sick is that, the opening, title track is so enjoyable that it’s hard to get past, because you want to hear it over and over again. A bitter, yet triumphant song, it ends on the lyric “so put this in your head for everything that wasn’t said,” making it the perfect send-off song to anyone whose face you’d rather not see again.
If you’re bored with music lately, perhaps this album from a band whose sound has been described as “Refused meets Ink and Dagger” will warm your spirits.