Album Review: I Am The Shotgun -Garroter

Garroter has a choppy, chunky sound reflecting the bloody bits and pieces on the album artwork. Palm muted chords ad nauseum, layered over an obscene amount of guitars and double pedal drums,  creates immense walls of polyphonic  discordance.  These colossal soundwalls persist at a sludgy pace, but frequent interruptions by blast beats and breakdowns keep them from being overwhelming. Despite the cacophonous music and coarse production quality, I Am The Shotgun have a cleancut aftertaste. This is by virtue of their technical precision; The staccato riffs are razor sharp, countering the blunt onslaught of bass and rhythm. Each instrument and even the vocals get lost in each other’s powerful sound. This music is characterized by the final product of noise and chaos, while no particular element steals the spotlight.

In an album entirely comprised of worthy tracks, Behold The Earth stands out as the strongest.  This song hits the ground running with an intoxicating bass groove, which morphs into a faster paced hook. The dissonant chords and slow, creeping rhythm invoke a sense of dread and unstoppable disaster.    The lyrics are terse and fatalistic, a grim reminder of humanity’s self-inflicted death sentence and our insignificance to the universe.

I Am The Shotgun are a reliable band for some decent deathcore with grind influences, and I enjoyed this album more than their self-titled release. What Garroter lacks in polished professionalism, it compensates with crude brutality and cathartic darkness. Three stars out of five!