A Wilhelm Scream, Career Suicide

Talk about your split personalities… When I first heard A Wilhelm Scream’s 2005 release, Ruiner, it knocked me down, cracked my head open, and utterly rearranged the mental furniture before stitching me back together again. The music was (and still is, but I’ll get to that) smart and literate to a ridiculous degree, polished but still fierce as hell, and packed full of yell-along melodic choruses and semi-ironic, bitter song titles/lyrics about our vapid, pointless modern society, melding prog-rock, hardcore, metal, and emo-boy dynamics into one damn near seamless whole. It’s an incredible album, honest.

With that in mind, then, I was psyched as hell to check the band out when they came through town not long afterward. When the show rolled ’round, though, the band that took the stage resembled old-school SoCal punk more than anything else — a bunch of beefy, tattooed guys roaring and howling up on stage, blasting away with their guitars and churning the meatheads on the floor into one of the most frenzied, violent pits I’d seen in a few years. The film/literary references got buried in the distortion, the noodly prog bits were subsumed by raw punk fury…it was like a totally different band.

A different band, mind you, but still a damn good band. It’s just that they’ve apparently got two sides to their musical personality — on the one hand they’re snarky, smarter-than-you post-hardcore guys, flipping you the bird while effortlessly mashing up the Dillinger Escape Plan and Say Anything!, and on the other they’re a four-on-the-floor punk band who loves nothing more than moshing like mad and playing as loud and fast as possible. And weirdly, that almost makes me like these guys more. How many people do you know who are totally one-dimensional and only love one thing in the world, period, especially when it comes to music? Not many, I’d bet; hell, even my mom listens to Metallica, for crying out loud, and her favorite singer’s Barry Manilow. We human beings are multifaceted and diverse, darn it.

Now, with all that out of the way, I must confess that Career Suicide didn’t immediately grab me, not the way that Ruiner had. I liked what I heard okay on first listen, but the album just didn’t bowl me over. Partly, I suspect it’s because I was hearing the album through the filter of that one show, catching nothing but the breakneck drums and hardcore yelps and figuring, “ah, so that’s why the show went like it did…” Maybe I went looking for an explanation for my dilemma, and that’s why I was initially lukewarm on Career Suicide.

Thing is, this album is definitely the same band — make no mistake about that. Everything I loved about Ruiner is back in force on Suicide, from Nuno Pereira’s gravelly-but-tuneful bellowing (which brings to mind Hot Water Music or Samiam at points, both favorably) to the whip-smart lyricism and pop-culture references (I think part of the reason I dig “Get Mad, You Son of a Bitch!” so much is because I love Glengarry Glen Ross) to the guitars that leap without even a blink from hardcore pummeling to Guitar Player-worthy metal licks to bassist Brian Robinson’s serpentine, proggy bass.

Tracks like “5 to 9,” “Die While We’re Young” (love the No Knife-esque guitars and desperate chorus vocals), “These Dead Streets,” “Career Suicide,” “Get Mad, You Son of a Bitch!,” “We Built This City! (On Debts and Booze),” and “I Wipe My Ass With Showbiz” burn with a righteous fury, so fucking fast I keep having to hit the Back button to keep up. And the more I listen, the more I want to hear it again, and again, over and over. Split personality? What split personality? Holy fuck do I like this band.