WAR FROM A HARLOTS MOUTH – In Shoals

Do not listen to this if you have a weak heart. Or neighbors that are easily disturbed. Or if you are sensitive. Or you like your Rock straight. And even if you think you do not belong to any of the groups at risk, you have been warned. War From A Harlots Mouth is a neckbreaking, massive attack which equals a 18-wheel-truck with no brakes involuntarily accelerating down a steep slope. A fully loaded truck that does a slalom, and unpredictable artistic turns and swings, so sudden that it almost topples over every time. Something you get sick by just from watching.

War From A Harlots Mouth from Berlin, Germany, are definitely original and new. But they also defy any categorization. One could do that in animation movies. Imagine the above truck to suddenly jump up, kick his heels in, and then do a tap dance. Only to jump headfirst into the next high velocity dive down the hill, kicking trees and stones left and right. Without warning, doing a pirouette in mid-air, stopping in a gust of dust and then marches slowly towards the valley. And then speeds up in milliseconds and hits you!

That is how the music on In Shoals feels. With a backbone comprised of Technical Death Metal, old school Death meeting the likes of Atheist, Coalesce, late Death, and a skin of Hardcore almost every song is extremely heavy. But this band has multiple personalities, and another one is their jazzy side. Jazzy? Jazzy! The band takes the term Technical in Technical Death Metal to the extreme. No single song is straight or what one expects, the musical road is twisted as a shallow stream in flat lands.

This is Deathcore, Mathcore, Grindcore, Jazzcore (“They Come In Shoals”, “No High Five For A C.oward”). Several parts are not even Heavy Metal any more, but Noise Rock interpretations of Free Jazz experiments on a sunny beach like “Justice From The Lips Of The Highest Bidder” or Doomy Barjazz layers in a universe of inertia like “Scully”, apocalyptic harbingers of doom embedded in sound collages like “Briefing Security Werewolves On Red Alert”. Actually, the song sounds as weird as the puzzling title and is a mere 45 seconds long, leaving behind a confused audience. Then one is hit by blast beats, Hardcore shouts, streaming into what seems to be a real riff (“Copyriot”). In Shoals is in music what in literature would be a mixture of Milton’s Paradise Lost and Lovecraft’s complete works. Don’t say you understand it.

No, the album defies description. This is either a landmark in Metal for those who are able to listen to an album twenty times before remembering more than an occasional chord or phrase, or a noise disaster that gives nightmares to the rest. And their parents. And the rest of the world as we know it. In other words: Brilliant. Adorable art. Awesome. Get it.

Metalheads would. Wimps instead would listen to their MySpace site first. Although the band does not stream the most comprehensible track of the album, “Crooks At Your Door”. Then again, that is maybe a good thing so one does not have any false ideas, although most bands would still make an entire album with the same number of sounds and notes the band uses in “Crooks At Your Door”.