Ferociously Rude
GRAMMY award-winning noise rock band from Haugesund, Norway, Årabrot, has released the last album of a three-part series via Eolian Empire and Fysisk Format. You Bunch of Idiots follows their 2013 Murder as Art and 2014 I Modi releases. Although You Bunch of Idiots is the third EP, this record marks Årabrot’s first United States release.
The band draws influence from several literature works, existentialists and romanticists such as Dante’s Inferno, Albert Camus and Edgar Allan Poe. You can definitely find this kind of provocative and unorthodox thinking in their album, You Bunch of Idiots.
The album opens with “Cannibal Manifesto,” a dark spoken word piece that jeers through a tin can on a soapbox, shouting lines like, “Nothing! Nothing! … Like your hopes…Nothing! … Like your heroes…Nothing!” And then there are weird lines like, “A piece of ass represents life like French fries!” It’s disturbingly and darkly comedic as it speaks on death, money, honor, religion and… ass French fries?
Årabrot gets noisy with “Time to Pull the Sticks,” a sludge punk song with some angry vocals and… is someone puking? “Celebration” isn’t much of a celebration, but more of a rock ‘n’ roll, pissed-off hissing fit. “Mea Culpa” is macabre and scathing with lyrics “Disgust! … Oh, it makes me sick!” It’s unnerving and uneasy. “It’s Hot Drop It” includes female vocals and doesn’t have quite the same grittiness or abrasiveness the rest of the album does, but it still carries ferocious, heavy rock weight and delivers as the album’s confrontational conclusion.
You Bunch of Idiots is downright grimy and gritty. It is mischievous. It is crass. It gets in your face and is rude about it and does not care. But don’t let that stop you from listening to this head-banger. “Spill your guts” and get sick with Årabrot’s You Bunch of Idiots.
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