Once in a great while, there’s a project or band that comes around that is so remarkably batfuckshit that I can’t help but praise it for days and weeks and potentially months. A few years ago, Melted Bodies achieved that with their debut album which I still return to relatively often. This year, it seems I have a couple squiddy boys to thank for scratching that same itch.
Squid Pisser (fuck, what a name) may read like a The Locust-birthed monstrosity – you’d be a quarter right; Three One G Records is run by Justin Pearson of The Locust and Dead Cross fame – and certainly its two members are fans if the music is anything to go off of, but this is different. The duo consists of Tommy Meehan (guitars and vocals; also of Deaf Club, Cancer Christ) and Seth Carolina (drums; also of Starcrawler), but they get a lot of help from their friends which makes the album’s title, My Tadpole Legion, more of a warning than anything else. It all carries the unhinged absurdism of an Ed, Edd & Eddy episode, but… wetter.
The feature-heavy album amounts to watching Immortan Joe’s War Boys ransack the shit out of your home. They’re in your fridge, jumping off the second-floor banister to create a cartoonishly human-shaped hole in your hardwood flooring, disturbing your sleeping cat, diving out of glass windows. It’s chaos incarnate that only seems to be holding on by a thread while everyone yells their own version of ‘witness me!’ into your face before doing something akin to a Jackass stunt that’s much more spontaneous than elaborately thought out. That’s not to say this music isn’t meticulous because it is – for all its wonderous, unflinching energy, that one single thread of order is working triple overtime to keep things from imploding fully.
The lead single and opening track, “Liquified Remains”, is the only track on this album where you can find Carolina and Meehan riding solo, er… duo. This is the first song I heard from them and holy fuck did it hook me like a worm. I must’ve looped it ten times before moving onto something else. Delivered with the subtlety of a derailed train, the serrated guitars and gruesome, phlegmy vocals that channel Mike Patton’s performance as the Left 4 Dead monsters form a sticky spearhead that penetrates with ease and locks into you thanks to the catchy barbs on it. There’s plenty of textures and sounds to focus on, enough to overstimulate but not overwhelm if you’re into this sort of uncompromising hardcore. It’s just a fun-ass time, and you can tell the band had a blast making the video. This was just the beginning.
From here on out, each song has at least one featured performer. My favorite of them is on the title track which features Yako of Melt-Banana fame. Her vocals stand out on the album as particularly commanding as if bellowed into a PA system. The track has a progressive, avant-garde looseness with the instrumentation capable of making these whiplashingly sharp J-turns, which goes very well with Yako if you’re familiar with the legendary Japanese noise band she’s a part of (if not, you should be).
“Both” has the esteemed pleasure of featuring Zaine Drayton of WACKO, the band that tore up a Denny’s restaurant in LA in 2019 (no, not that one – this one). It’s a more straightforward hardcore song, again playing to the featured artist’s strengths, but remains a fierce example of the power of Squid Pisser. “Violence Forever” also deserves a mention along these lines – it features Meghan O’Neil of Punch fame.
“Marching For Trash”, a cover of The Crucifucks‘ song of the same name, is a bouncy little joint featuring Arrow DeWilde also of Starcrawler which is a grungy indie rock band – solid, but unassuming compared to this. Here though, DeWilde lets loose a bit – she ratchets up her voice in pitch giving it this oddly playful, almost bratty component to match the original song’s vocals. The rapid blast hook that melts down after a few seconds is reminiscent of The Blood Brothers‘ “Trash Flavored Trash” and no, not just because of the name. “Vibe Monster” is the closest you get to a break. It has a dreary tone to it, perfect for The Locust‘s Joseph K. Karam to come in and wriggle all over, and that’s exactly what he does. Drums are as eclectic as ever, but resign themselves to a slower speed to maintain this malaise or drug-addled haze to it all. If the first six tracks were a zoo animal outbreak, this is the moment the tranquilizer darts get shot into the spongy ass of the album.
Of course, that still leaves us with the last two tracks including the blasphemous, much appreciated “Fuck Your Preacher” that channels that “Nazi Punks Fuck Off’ balance of message and intensity (with Saint Anthony of Cancer Christ no less). At just under 19 minutes total, My Tadpole Legion crams many things in at the pace of a divebombing plane. It really asks a lot of you, keeping up being the prime directive, and I can see some people criticizing it for being a bit disjointed and uneven. Fair, but it’s not a concern for me. Squid Pisser have set up the most wild golden shower of eruptive, truly unpredictable hardcore and noise I’ve seen in quite some time. My only wish for future work is to see more of what the duo can do on their own. Features are great, but the vocals Meehan brings are a special, untapped sort of hell I’d love to hear more of.
My Tadpole Legion is like a compilation album of hardcore and heavy music’s most valuable freaks (MVFs) with Squid Pisser as its gooey hosts. It’s a circus of mucus and bile, frog spawn frolicking among the chum. Even the duo’s costuming, prevalent in all their videos and promo material, calls back to the classical grey alien look, but designed by schlock horror VFX artists for extra off-putting dimensioning (this is a compliment). It’s the kind of perfectly messy concoction that’s able to soundtrack my playthrough of the Resident Evil 4 remake, a bus ride to work, or an octopus-worm orgy. What you do is your business, but no matter how freaky it gets, I have a feeling Squid Pisser would be proud of you, maybe even join in. Keep both eyes on this band.
Band photo by Saint Anthony
