REVIEW: Bamboo Diet’s “DSM-VI”
DSM-VI is an album that is, by all means, demented. Sick and demented. If you are a fan of that progressive crunch that bands like Unsane, Rapeman, and Trumans Water are known for, you are going to eat up the viciousness of Bamboo Diet from Montreal. It’s brutal mayhem from start to finish, produced in a fashion that’s a combination of lo-fi and garage,as if these guys borrowed their grandfather’s cassette deck and said “let’s record this thing”, but it fits their music perfectly. The guitar and bass work are abrasive, and the drums are claustrophobic and as powerful as anything you ever heard. At one point during “Bonemeal”, guitarist/vocalist Terence Boisvert sounds as if he magically pulled out a bottleneck and just dug deep into some random Canadian swamp and ripped into the blues. It sounds so out of place, foreign and distant, but it matches the doom of the song, as if to say “the blues is what you’re dealing with, let’s go deeper”. “Obakemono” is the kind of song where the volume and intensity of that rising chord will make you feel like blood is rushing to your head or you feel gun power rising up your neck with a skull filled with explosives.
Fans of White Mice could easily get into the level of maniacal sound Bamboo Diet create, I would love to know what a Bamboo Diet show consists of. As for their progressive-ness,it comes from not only being able to switch tempos at any given moment, but understanding the changes and not just chopping up their songs for the sake of sounding technical. There’s volume, there’s technicality, the sound quality is straight out of a 1962 garage, but they do it without sounding like guys who have no idea what they’re doing. This is awesome.
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Jp posted: 29 Apr at 6:24 pm
I saw Bamboo Diet live in Montreal and they blew me away. Pure, raw, angry sound. I loved it.