The 2nd Great American Maggot Birthday: The Album That Broke Me
You expect certain levels of weirdness with any email inbox. Spam and phishing emails are par for the course and when you have an email associated with a small magazine you get requests for coverage from time to time. So when I got an email from a “Notorious Raleigh Metal Band” known for their “ukneec [sic]” sound and the obviously fake name Maggot Cheese I wasn’t too put off by it. I moved it to spam and reported it as potential phishing, my day went on and that was the end of things. Done and dusted.
Until the cd ended up in my mailbox. Not my inbox, my actual mailbox in a dollar store jewel case with a Memorex CD covered in sharpie doodles and the words “Maggot Cheese: The 2nd Great American Maggot Birthday.” No postmark, no further packaging, no clue how they pried open my apartment mailbox without breaking the lock. But I have it now, and God knows what else I might find if I don’t write this so I figured I’d give it a shot; and how bad could a mystery CD left by terrifying strangers be?
Loaded up to a secure digital environment (because I’m only so stupid, never download strange CDs to your actual computer folks) I was surprised to see that the disc did actually have songs and they were even named. Not as surprised though as I was to see that across 9 songs and 30 minutes, the first song made up 8 minutes of the playtime and set the tone of the rest of the album.
Maggot Cheese’s sound can’t be defined and I mean that as the deepest insult. The first song, as mentioned prior, is 8 minutes long and the first 5 minutes of that are a bass guitar solo leading into 2 minutes of screaming and the rest of the instruments joining in like they all forgot their cues and woke up at different times. The last minute is 10 seconds of silence before catching the lead singer picking up his DoorDash order. All this to say, “Awaken the IHOP Demon” is probably my favorite song on the album and I’m still left wondering if ordering IHOP was intentional or not.
The rest of the album is a descent into auditory madness. “Awakened in Her Enemy’s Palazzo” and “Smut From a Dollar General” are dirges that push the electric guitarist to his limit, with lyrics so incomprehensible I’m not even sure a language was being spoken. Honestly great for the first 20 seconds until the drums came in with their audio mixed so high that the other instruments sounded like they were being played ten feet away from the microphones.
“Human Mulch” is mercifully short, lasting only 30 seconds and consisting mostly of industrial noise. No, not ‘industrial noise’ the music genre that uses heavy electronic distortion I mean they sampled a tractor. I think “Human Mulch” was supposed to lead into “Lazer Tag with Guns” but the 10 second track that was “Lazer Tag with Guns” must’ve had some sort of production error because it lasts exactly one guitar chord. Which is disappointing not only because at this point I was seeing which direction the train was going to crash next after pinballing off the last few boulders, but because apparently “Lazer Tag with Guns” was actually REALLY important to understanding the themes of “Lazer Tag Decapitation.”
The good times from morbid curiosity are limited however. And we hit a speedbump in the form of “Freeze Dried Roadkill” which aside from being six minutes long is a ballad where the lead singer is the most clear. The lead singer is sobbing on and off during the song. Not the worst thing in the world, but what I’ve learned is one of the most torturous experiences is that at 1 minute and 13 seconds one of the strings on the electric guitar snaps and the guitarist plays through. The remainder of the 6 minute song is spent playing with audibly missing notes.
The 2nd Great American Maggot Birthday must have been recorded in a single day, because this continues into “My Bloody Photobooth” and “Banned From IHOP.” Both of which make heavy use of samples, some of which I question the legality of their use.
This CD is a cognito hazard and listening to it has actively made my life worse, compounded with the fact I can’t stop humming some of these songs. It’s loud, it’s poorly produced, it’s vulgar on the parts you can understand and harsh on the parts you can’t, and I’ve been receiving these CDs every three days since March 6th. Hopefully now I can go back to living my life and Maggot Cheese never bothers me again, burn any CDs you get and smash the remains with hammers.
10 out of 10, look forward to the next tour.