If there is one thing to be said about Fungus Inc.’s Gettin’ Drunk & Spreadin’ Spunk, it’s that these Belgian boys know what they’re doing. However, if there are two things to be said about it, the second thing must inevitably be that what these Belgian boys are doing is making unforgivably terrible music.
Becomin’ Inebriated & Dispersin’ One’s Seed is a death metal record, one is grudgingly forced to admit. An entirely insipid, utterly joyless, fifth-rate non-shocking shock-rock hack-job of a death metal record, to be sure, but a death metal record nonetheless. Imagine, if you must, early Death or Obituary at their most two-stepping, one-riff-throttling rudimentary, and then drain every last hint of redeeming quality from either and you’ve got the kind of band that Fungus Inc. wishes it could be.
Ten songs gurgle, groove, and gutter by for the longest thirty-three minutes of your damn life, with a cheap, splashy production and the limpest collection of riffs this side of Metallica’s staff urologist. In fact, to call the bullshit noise pumped out by the guitarist “riffs” would be to do a tremendous disservice not just to the word “riffs,” but also to the letters “r,” “i,” “f,” and “s.” Meanwhile, the drums sound like a four-piece kit made of old cereal boxes, aluminum foil-covered Frisbees, and a damp two-by-four.
Perhaps strangest and most damnably god-awful about this whole demoralizing mess is that all these adolescent gross-out songs (e.g., “Two in the Pink One in the Stink,” “We Will Fuck,” and “Tag Team of Perfection,” the latter of which is a heart-warming paean to ambidextrous masturbation) are played with as straight a face as is possible from a vocalist who calls himself The Humongous Fungus. Dude’s got a reasonably full, deep death growl, allowing one to catch fragments of such stirring poetry as “Suck on my dick / My whiskey dick,” “Got a stinky dink / And sweaty balls,” “I just wanna fuck a goat,” and “I just want a blowjob / Put your lips around my dick / [Something something] / Suck my cock and gives these nuts a lick.” I don’t know if they have such as monster truck rallies in Belgium, but if so maybe The Humongous Asshole could pick up some work there announcing the alternate understudies to the second string pit crew.
On the whole, Imbibin’ Copiously & Disgorgin’ the Contents of One’s Seminal Vesicles poses more questions than it answers. For example: Is it really possible that by the time the bassist got around to choosing a pseudonym, the only name left in all metaldom was “Lil’ Nop”? And since when did having fingers give every last chucklehead on earth the right to pick up a guitar? And what is a whiskey dick, anyway? Is it like a novelty whiskey that gets bottled in a large glass penis? And if so, are there attached glass testicles, or is the whiskey dick a whiskey eunuch? And last but not least, just an all-around and existentially despondent lament: Why?
I suppose one of the only positive things to be said about Recklessly Increasin’ One’s Blood Alcohol Content & Ejaculatin’ Semen from the Urethral Opening at the Tip of One’s Blood-Engorged Shame-Wand is that it will make whatever misguided, testosterone-laced, groove-pandering, knuckle-dragging, lunk-headed bullshit you decide to listen to after it sound like Mahler’s goddamn 2nd. So…hooray? If you assholes haven’t got the picture yet, I did not enjoy this. I do not enjoy this. You should not enjoy this. But sure, here are some numbers to justify all that, you unslakable charlatans: Two points. A gold star gleaming in an otherwise empty cosmos. A polished statue of the letter “p” for no reason at all. Take a “j” if you’d rather. A septagonal medal pinned on the chest of the guy standing next to you. Two fucking meaningless, arbitrary, lonely, wombless and havenless numbers are awarded to this slop because, let’s see, there was one sleepily interesting riff in “Whiskey Dick” (which, it should be said, was then played to death and so eventually I hated it and felt compelled to hit it in the face with a cinder block or at least to turn it off but anyway it’s good for a little while) and then also, hell, one other point because the album is over now and I can do something more productive with my time, like jump out a window, or toss a firecracker into the Louvre’s bathroom, or memorize Rick _antorum’s translation of the Bible in which all traces of the letter “s” have been removed because “s” is the most sssssinful and ssssssseductive and ssssssssexy of the letters (sorry, Je_u_), or eat my left arm, or stare at a scab on a dog for twelve days. Fuck you, Fungus Inc.; fuck you, Belgium; fuck you, music.
