Cretin is not exactly prolific.
It’s been eight years since this California collective’s first album, their only previous full-length, itself delivered a decade after the band’s initial run ended in 1996. That earliest attempt netted only a demo and a four-song EP, and even bassist Matt Widener admits that Cretin didn’t really begin in earnest until their second attempt in 2001. And, hell, even then, it took them a further five years to make a record.
Quite appropriately titled Freakery, that first album was a gnarled blast of Repulsion homage, with a dash of Terrorizer, delivered with a demented black-tooth grin and a severed tongue planted firmly in cheek. (Someone’s tongue, maybe someone else’s cheek… Make of that every possible option – that’s how Cretin rolls.) Freakery’s tunes were gruesome tales of depravity and perversion at the crossroads of lo-fi grind and rudimentary death metal, and the results were respectable, filthy, ugly, and garnered some critical praise, though I must admit that I’ve never held it as first-tier. It was a good grind record, but short of a great one, with its most notable elements in its shamelessly borrowed aesthetic and those lyrical threads of over-the-top humor-horror-hideousness.
Flash forward to 2014, and here’s album number two. Since Freakery, two-thirds of Cretin’s founders joined the actual Repulsion – drummer Col Jones is still a member – while Widener worked on the folk-grind mash-up of Liberteer, which was a project I found to be a bit better in theory than in actual execution. This reformed (or at least reactivated) Cretin has also expanded to a quartet now, adding Dreaming Dead guitarist Elizabeth Schall on second guitar, alongside Marissa Martinez.
With Stranger, the approach has shifted a few years forward in grindcore’s past, increasing the death metal elements in their sound. Just as a band like Napalm Death shifted further into death metal territory for Harmony Corruption, some two decades later, Cretin’s backwards-facing trajectory follows suit. This is still grind for the old-school grinder, and that ultimately remains both its best and most prominent quality. The increased focus on death metal leads to some tighter riffing, but there’s still plenty of fury on hand, plenty of squalling noise that passes as guitar solos, plenty of blasting and grunting.
Also, somewhere between then and now, Cretin abandoned the disturbingly goofy (or goofily disturbing) lyrical angle of Freakery in favor of the just disturbing, now presented in JR Hayes-ish vignettes. Like Hayes’ work in Pig Destroyer, these lyrics are still creepy-weird – honestly more so now that they’re more like character studies or snapshots of madness than sketches of gross-out B-movie plots, more tales of human inhumanity minus those earlier glimpses of sicker-than-thou silliness. In the absence of the band’s previous twisted sense of humor, there’s a darker seriousness that comes into play, and though some fans of Freakery may miss the black comedy, the lack thereof only further increases the depravity that Cretin always claimed. Before, it seemed like a joke – and though it’s still over-the-top, still filled with Cretanic whatthefreakery, now in that seriousness, it seems more real, and thus more dark, and thus more frightening.
Still, lyrical emphasis is one thing, and subtle stylistic shifts another, but in the end, it always comes down to songs. In that manner more than any other, Stranger is an improvement upon Freakery, tighter and sharper, in some ways less ugly and yet still uglier in all the right ones. Album opener “It” is great, but later tracks like “We Live In A Cave” and “Knights Of The Rail” eclipse it quickly, while the title track, the belatedly-titular “Freakery,” and the raging closer “How To Wreck Your Life In Three Days” stand as the best on hand.
Whereas Freakery ripped by in a blast-and-bash blitzkrieg, somewhat invigorating but easily forgotten, Stranger offers more to grasp onto. There’s some room for improvement – Cretin still feels like a tribute act, more than an actual band in their own right – but it’s a definite and marked step in the right direction. I rarely reach for Freakery, and when I do, it only usually serves to remind me of why I don’t – it’s fine, but there’s better grind records to spin, one of which is this one. And yes, there’s better ones than Stranger, too, but nearly fifteen years after their second coming, at the rate of one record every eight years, Cretin is creeping forward.
At least creeping is one of the things they do best.
