Album review: THE LURKING CORPSES – Workin’ For The Devil

Hells Headbangers – Out Now.

Human being develop many different mechanisms through life in order to cope with and protect themselves from everyday dangers, the most common of which are the application of logic and the trust in one’s git instincts.

Being a firm believer in the powers of the latter, I remember feeling quite sceptical about the prospect of reviewing “Workin’ For The Devil”, the latest studio album by the Death/Punk combo Lurking Fear and, sadly, it took minutes after first pushing the play button or all my fears and inhibitions to be proven totally justified.

If, on the strength of the pretty colourful album cover on offer alone, you assumed that this Indiana-based quintet worships all things related to the Horror Punk legends Misfits then you will be happy to know that you were not too far off the mark.

Sadly, however, for this album, this is one of the few cases I can personally remember where any attempt towards combining different styles of music, in this case classic and extreme Metal ones, on top of a normally pretty accommodating musical formula like Punk Rock has proved to be such a disastrous affair.

The first few ‘black clouds’ stated to gather quite early in the album with…wait for it…Lord Vladimir Von Ghoul making a terrible attempt towards emulating the voice of the mighty King Diamond in the opening same-titled composition.

From that point onwards, listening to the album became a struggle between separating, on one hand, songs that are decent but which failed to reach their true potential while, on the other, terrible musical ‘ideas’ that should never have been explored by the band in the first place.

In the former category you can find compositions such as the mid-tempo riffed classic Metal ditto “The Gate” and the Punk-laden Misfits-worship piece “Love Fades Away”, both being quite enjoyable affairs indeed.

Sadly these relatively fine tunes have to share space with the childish out-of-key vocal melodies of “Dead Fuck” and harmony-driven compositions like “In Hell (I Wait For You” where the band’s singer seems to once again be incapable of staying focused on the task at hand.

I could literally be talking for hours about what I really feel about “Workin’ For The Devil” but that would be pretty pointless indeed as the majority of my thoughts and feelings are of negative nature.

It is very obvious to me that this quintet knows how to perform decent music, the kind that would make many fans of early Misfits to join their cause, had they be willing to take what they do more seriously.

Now, as they are clearly neither capable nor willing of presenting us with a serious piece of work and we do live in a day and age where free time is the most precious commodity; my low rating is, I feel, thoroughly justified.

John Stefanis

Rating: **1/2 (2.5/5.0)

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Power Plays w/c 9 December 2024

In this sequence we play ‘The Best of 2024′ GRTR! reviewer selections

Featured Albums w/c 9 December 2024

09:00-12:00 The Best of 2024 (Melodic Rock)
12:00-13:00 The Best of 2003-2024 (Melodic Hard Rock)
14:00-16:00 The Best of 2024 (Singer Songwriter)