REVIEW: Gronibard – We Are French, Fukk You

When I heard there was a new Gronibard full length album coming out, my first reaction was in total and utter disbelief. Why? Because Gronibard seem like real lazy fucks. I mean, they released their self titled debut in 2001, a small three way split in 2003 and a really, really dodgy MCD in 2004. It just seemed like they couldn’t give a shit: that they were just into grind for the gay sex.

Then I saw the cover art and the album title and I got really excited. We Are French, Fukk You is an obvious play on the infamous Sadistik Exekution album title We Are Death, Fukk You that Rok scrawled on the CD master in response to his band being promoted as a black metal band. The cover art – well it just speaks for itself doesn’t it? A fucking fantastic piece of art to promote a grindcore band.

Now I’ll have to explain this review in context: I fucking love Gronibard’s self titled album. It would probably land somewhere in my top 20 grind albums, and is definitely in my regularly rotation. It’s one of those rare albums that even people not fans of the genre can enjoy. Not only was it ridiculously funny with its insane French porn samples, retarded, over-the-top vocals from pitch-shifted roars to ear-piercing sissy screeches but at the end of the day it was a fucking AWESOME grind album with smatterings of gore, hardcore and rock influence.

The sound was absolutely monstrous – the sheer size of the guitar tone, mixed with obscenely bass-heavy bottom end just made the release crushing. Couple that with a seemingly endless supply of catchy, grooving riffs and you’ve got a winning album. Gronibard succeeded where essentially no one else had – making a comedy grind album that was still fundamentally better musically than 99% of serious grindcore out there.

The follow up however – the fairly lazily executed MCD Satanic Tuning Club left a little to be desired – not in terms of song quality, because the few songs Gronibard decided to put on there were great, but more so in terms of quanity. All we got were a handful of new songs with some retarded acoustic renditions of old material which is pretty weak for a 3 year follow up to such an amazing album.

Now a full 7 years after their debut Gronibard are back in a whirlwind of gore, grind and cooking oil. To be honest, I’m fairly underwhelmed. Sure the album has the signature Gronibard goofiness, but the music itself seems entirely lacking.

We get a whole lot of mid-paced, fairly groovy gore with plenty of pitch shifted vocals, like the Cock and Ball Torture inspired No Nuggets No Glory – but wheres the fucking grind man? The really cheap and ultra-catchy grooves and breakdowns on the self titled album ruled because they were such an enormous contrast to the uptempo blasting passages – it’s called dynamics I believe.

In track three we get another mid-paced retarded-anthem in Mongolito, a few irrelevant ten second pseudo-jazz throw away tracks in the two Spectorum tracks, another mid-paced gore track in the title track, then some more mid-paced gore, then a rock riff going into some mid-paced gore... You get the idea.

Man, what a disappointment. I mean, it’s not terrible, but the grindcore has just dropped off completely and been replaced by rock influenced mid-paced gore. Now I love my The Day Everything Became Nothing, but all of this material just seems to fall flat – so many of the riffs sound the same because they’re all just the same rock or gore riffs used over and over again. The quirkiness doesn’t seem fun anymore – and all kinda pales in comparison to a man screeching a circus beat over a brutal grind blastbeat.

This really pains me to say this, but if this is the result of another 3 years of work I think Gronibard may have run its course. There is nothing new to this album what so ever. It’s less quirky, less grindy, less fun and less original then any of its predecessors with lesser production. It hits the mark as a pretty mediocre mid-paced rocking gore album, but I was expecting so much more.

For me this is a very sad situation, it was only a two weeks ago that I said “every grind fan should own [Gronibard’s self titled album] – and that’s no small statement”. I guess this is just the result of Gronibard just losing interest in their music – which is totally understandable. At least I’ll always have the first album, which totally defied the logic of comedic grind bands being relegated as one trick pony’s producing inferior music.

http://www.myspace.com/gronibard
http://www.bonesbrigaderecords.com
http://www.myspace.com/bonesrecords