The arrival of a new Agoraphobic Nosebleed album was once cause for
much chortling, since the song titles were hilarious and the songs
themselves were frequently so short, you barely had time to finish
laughing at the title before the track was over. No more. On
Agorapocalypse, the band has reinvented itself as a savage
industrial-metal machine, with multiple vocalists (including the
group’s first female member, the single-named Kat) shrieking and
roaring atop a blaze of thrashy riffs and relentless drum-machine
barrages. The songs have gotten much longer; where they once averaged
five to 30 seconds, now tracks like “White on White Crime” and “First
National Stem Cell and Clone” are passing the three-minute mark with
ease, incorporating the usual Nosebleed trademarks of hilariously apt
dialogue samples and vicious guitars, while bringing new tricks to bear
— notably, choruses and dynamic shifts. Oh, and guitar
solos — and surprisingly interesting, whammy-bar-abusing ones at
that. Whether fans of Nosebleed’s earlier, funnier work will be happy
about these developments remains to be seen. — Phil
Freeman
This article appears in Apr 22-28, 2009.
