Beats: dropbunny – IO review


When I was asked if I could review this album, I instantly laughed at the name. Alright, I’ve had my rant about terrible band names but this one is actually hilarious which makes it awesome! I have no idea why I laughed so much but I did.

Anyway, dropbunny is a seven-piece metal band from Melbourne, Australia that formed in 2009 with members Xero & John Barrymore recording their first album, “Hypothesis” with the aid of session drummer Matt Leiber. After six months, they’d added a permanent guitarist and began performing live. If they’d have distributed their album through more mainstream channels, it would’ve been at #50 in the ARIA charts which is bloody impressive for a first album, especially as they were self-promoting!

I’d never heard dropbunny before, so I wasn’t quite knowing what to expect... I really love getting sent an album having not heard the band previously.

The first track, Plummet, starts out with static noise and a nice, heavy bassline which isn’t dissimilar to that associated with nu-metal, before some drumming and weird heavy whispering vocals join the party. They soon invite some guitars in, along with some more aggressive nu-death (I made that term up) vocals. I really love the bassline in this and it continues through the track. It’s a great track to kick off the album with.

Notable tracks include Jumped which is an acoustic track but gets electric and just bizarre about half way through; it’s very mellow and really reminds me of tool which is never a bad thing.

Gimpman Cometh is a very interesting one and I can only presume that the title of the song is a pun on Charlie’s play ‘The Nightman Cometh’ from one of my favourite T.V. shows, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. That was my precise thought as soon as I read the song title, anyway. It has a nice, acoustic intro with yet more weird, narrative vocals before some clean singing that sounds almost out of tune (but works) comes in along with some drumming. The song progresses with a static bassline and aggressive shouting vocals. It has a really weird atmosphere to it that I can’t quite describe.

All in all, I’m enjoying this album. It’s totally fucking bizarre and just all over the place. One of the pleasures of reviewing music is getting sent all kinds of crazy stuff and this has to be at the top of my list of weird metal; in fact, if there was a sub-genre called ‘weird metal’ these guys would be the champions.

DropbunnyIO is out on Monday 6th August and it will fuck your shit up.

You can download their first album, Hypothesis for free here: dropbunny.bandcamp.com


Nate

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