The title to the latest offering from GWAR is very appropriate. At a typical carnival, one will find all manner of curiosities. Carnivals are a collection of strange, shocking, and sometimes downright disturbing acts that never fail to captivate the attention of the public. GWAR’s Carnival of Chaos is just that... a truly diverse assemblage of music that will occasionally repulse but always entertain the listener. This album continues down the path that the last few GWAR albums have followed. Oddly, the band that built their reputation on shock value and vulgarity actually seems to be trying to prove that they have some musical merit after all. If you could count high enough to catalog all the obscenities on Scumdogs of the Universe and stack them up against CoC, you would find that this newest album doesn’t measure up. Somewhere in the tormented mind of Oderus Urungus (the lead 'singer') lurked the idea that he didn't need to pack all his songs wall to wall with vulgarity to make a good tune. Amazingly, he listened to himself and out came CoC.
Almost every genre of music is covered on CoC. There is the blazingly fast "Back to Iraq" and "Penguin Attack"; the turgid ballads "Sammy" and "Endless Apocalypse"; and a power punk tune "Hate Love Songs" (sung by the inimitable Beefcake the Mighty). If that wasn’t enough diversity, you also get the hillbilly influenced (!) "Sex Cow", and most startling of all, a surprisingly serious attempt at a smoky jazz ballad sung by the resident female Slymenstra called "Don't need a man". All in all, there are 18 big tracks of mayhem. All of them except one ("Preskool Prostitute") are eminently listenable and most could even get radio airplay if any station was brave enough. This album is no more vulgar than the average episode of Beavis & Butthead. One would think that such a move would be the undoing of GWAR, but the opposite is true. This album is at times riotously funny, at times headbangingly thrashy, and at all times fun.
It's almost ridiculous to consider that GWAR has matured, but in their own twisted way they have. Carnival of Chaos is a legitimately good metal album that doesn’t rely on gratuitous swearing like most of the bands previous records have. CoC is still unmistakably GWAR... but it is a new GWAR capable of entertaining without alienating old fans or turning away new ones. They have grown up and left adolescence behind, but don’t worry- they’re far from being adults. The goofy foam rubber costumes are still there and the music is still far from tame, but it is more accessible while retaining the essence of the band that spawned it.
Back to Index