Sex Vid- Communal Living (2008)
In a previous post, I compared the Failures album unfavorably to Moby-Dick and Paradise Lost, and it should be said that the Sex Vid album also is in no danger of toppling Don Quixote or Beowulf in my regard. But more to the point, Communal Living is unlikely to unseat favorites like Kings of Punk, Tied Down, the Die Kreuzen album, or Conquest For Death.
Still, the record starts off strong: “Cleansing” could have been on the first few Poison Idea records, and “Footsteps” is both menacing and memorable (as well as the strongest tune here). The other fast songs race by without making an impact, until the record completely dead-ends into the unpleasant, anti-social, grotesquely uncatchy and solipsistic two-part “Communal Living.” Everything is shared, boo hoo. This band’s problems are so vague and psychotic that the discordant guitars and intense vocalizing that dress this up become almost self-parody.
Naturally, fans of this band will argue that this “dissonant, ritualistic, and hateful” music is brilliant for all of those reasons, but Samhain were dissonant AND catchy, Negative Approach were hateful AND catchy, and I have no idea what “ritualistic” means. To the extent that “liking” this music is not merely equivalent to having spent $10 on it, it is impossible to conceive how something so unlikeable, unpleasant, and miserable can make an argument for taking up my time. I neither learn anything about life while listening to this record, nor can I imagine putting any of these songs on a mixtape or playing them from a jukebox. What other purposes they will be put to, is not for me to imagine.
