Reviews

The Acacia Strain, in the time between the release of their soul crushing release 3750 and this one, have lost a guitarist but discovered an A Life Once Lost type groove.  They still sound like sticking your head into a moving cement mixer filled with cinderblocks, only this time, their sound is less like a huge wave of sonic destruction and more like two or three smaller waves of destruction.  All the songs have lyrics now, and the lyrics are as dark as ever.  The only thing is, where they were misanthropic before now they are grotestly sexual and misogynistic.  I’m all for lyrics about killing people, as long as it’s equal opportunity slaughter and not twisted rape fantasies like in the song See You Next Tuesday (get it? C U N T ?).  The music is pretty stellar, except when it drifts too far into Bury Your Dead moshcore, but these lyrics have definitely poisoned the well.
 
Burnface, the first proper song on the album, sounds like an out take form ALOL’s Hunter - and that’s a great thing.  At first I was really excited by the lyrics I understood; something about “We are at war” and “You will get what you deserve,” but then I read the lyrics and it’s  a fantasy about a woman dying from an STD.  The next track 4x4 is killer, and gender neutral in its frank descriptions of death and shit eating.  But then the next track As If Set Afire is back to the grind, talking about killing girls.  This song is great, and were it not for the over-the-top sexual/murder imagery of See You Next Tuesday and The Demolishor, the gender thing would have been totally negligible.  But at this point I’m on edge, scanning for hidden hatred and determining that 5 out of 11 tracks are explicitly about dead girls while 0 out of 11 are about dead dudes and about 11 out of 11 are about something dying.
 
The art on The Dead Walk is a full on five out of five, the music is a solid four plus, but the lyrics are fucking disappointing.  A good horror/murder motif can be well executed and made to work but lines like “You’re going to taste my DNA whether you like it or not” are too fucked up to not say something about.  That line and “I bet you could fit five cocks up that ass/ why don’t you strap a mattress to that back?” really make me regret being such a fan of this band in the first place.