Testikill — Robitussatan

“Robitussatan” is the second album from this mysterious state side project, and it’s very much a game of two half’s. The first eight tracks are often overloaded and manic collusions between muffled drum ‘n’ bass runs, gone wrong Casio core electronics, grinding metallic riffing and guttural  'choke-up-your-guts' vocals. The second half of the album is taken up by a fifty four minute track of noisy guitar texturing with doom and industrial undertones.

So the first batch of eight tracks are fairly short and swift in their attack and feel- they run between just over the two minute work to the four and half minute mark a piece. The tracks in this first half move from: blistering and pumped-up overloads, through to sleazed yet slightly geeky electro beat work-outs  with guttural rants and Casio cuteness. Onto  lurching, droning and ugly bass dwells with overloaded madman rants about Satan and being buried in a shallow grave. This first half of the album is enjoyable overloading attack for the first few plays around, but after those first few plays you start to notice the amateurish and bed room project likes cracks in the material which sadly appear in most of the eight tracks here. I guess it’s really down to how closely your listening- so on the surface this first half is a exhilarating and manic overload of electro metal collusion; but just don’t dig too deep or you can see  in your minds eye a bunch of teenagers in the bedroom of middle class America home thinking their cool and evil.

Sadly the second half of the record is less easy to forgive or down play it’s bad sides. This fifty three minute last track is entitled “Final Transmission Before Entering Valhalla” and it finds the project winding out this rather dull, groaning and searing noisy guitar texture with thumb bass simmers, vague industrial clunkings, (meant to be) sinister sounding ambient wonderings and guitar harmonics.  It’s basically a very low grade, badly thought out example of doomed guitar meets (not so) creepy ambience that really goes no-where, and boy does it drag…I’ve played it twice and each time it felt like a lifetime(and not a good or worthwhile lifetime).

So this really is a very mixed bag indeed…the first half shows promise for it’s overloaded ‘n’ demented zeal and it’s metal forced into electronica attack. And the second half is just a bland and pretty aimless dwell in doomed ambient drone… so basically this is a ‘better luck next time guys, but well done for trying’ situation really....this just scrapes in at 3 kudos!