Music

The grossest metal songs of the week

by Josiah Hughes

Each Friday on Garbage Day, we rummage through pop culture’s trash cans and pick the week’s grossest item to keep forever. This week, we look at the worst metal offerings.

Without question, it was garbage day across this whole garbage country all garbage week thanks to Toronto’s garbage mayor, who infected us all (and the rest of this world) with his viral poison on more than one occasion. From the people who were repeating the same jokes over and over again (“Vancouver’s mayor was smoking something too…. SALMON LOLOLOL!”) to people who were turning into a slacktivist PSA about addiction, it was as uncomfortable as it was fun. But even though he’s buds with Drake and tweets about the Red Bull Thre3style competition, ol’ Robby isn’t a musician. He may be an actual garbage man made of garbage, but he’s not allowed to be part of Garbage Day.

It was tempting to give some coveted Garbage Day notoriety to emo-metal goof Ronnie Radke, especially after his band Falling in Reverse released their unspeakably awful (and reductive on countless levels) video for “Bad Girls Club.”

The goofy pop song is far from his worst sin, however (he has a history that includes rap diss tracks for electro-emo bands and going to jail for connection to a murder, after all) so I dedicated a full list to his decade of transgressions instead.

Still, the gross Warped Tour emo revival is a dark force that continues to ooze out the sickest of new content week after week, and plenty of Radke’s corny contemporaries were letting loose some nasty releases this week.

Bandana’d brethren Avenged Sevenfold have likely influenced Radke’s whole schtick more than he’s willing to admit, updating hair metal’s overblown aesthetic for a new era. Where Radke and his buddies frolic around in goofy band T’s with, like, neon green architectural drawings on them, however, Avenged Sevenfold have transformed fake metal into something for the beefier chongo variety (a.k.a. dudes with three-foot wide necks who don’t realize that the metal they love actually sounds like an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical with chunky guitars).

The band’s new single “Shepherd of Fire” has the sort of name that sounds like it came from the brain of a college freshman getting stoned for the first time (“Dude, imagine if I was a shepherd…OF FIRE”). It also has a video that abandons their previous penchant for overblown rock star posturing, instead offering up a newer, more refined Avenged Sevenfold.

After an unbearably long intro that features the band cruising in a gross hot rod in front of a shitty movie screen (it honestly looks like it could be a Social Distortion video, which is sad on all levels), they launch into their shitty discount “Enter Sandman” riff. Then the double kicks come in and the singer starts pooing the song’s gross lyrics out. I mean, not literally, but still kinda literally.

It’s off-putting, to be sure, but it’s not quite the worst thing of the week. Another band that’s probably shared some lines — or at least a lukewarm Warped Tour buffet meal — with Radke in the past is UK outfit Asking Alexandria. They just shared the “uncensored” clip for their abhorrent “Killing You,” and it’s basically a crass, classless music video that finally delves into occult sex rituals with all of the subtlety and taste of an Axe Body Spray commercial. Imagine if the cast and crew of The Canyons remade Eyes Wide Shut. Or just imagine the world around you is full of horrendous mouthbreathers pretending they’re making art. Oh wait, it is.

Staying within the hard-rockin’ bro zone, human STIs Buckcherry also released a new video for their new song “Wrath.” And it certainly does feel like they’re taking out their wrath on us, offering up a groovy, mid-tempo hard rock pop song built on the phrase “hey maaaan.” Somewhere near you, there’s a suburban bar that only serves Labatt Blue and hosts the world’s most depressing/underattended karaoke night on Tuesdays. Those people don’t know who Buckcherry is, but if they did it’d be their favourite band. Especially when the douchey frontman aggressively sneers “Please pray for me father” in the middle of a depressing underground cage match.

None of these things are fun, though. They’re just horrible and uncomfortable, the musical equivalent of getting an intrusive physical examination or having a long discussion about finance with a friend who owes you money. Garbage Day isn’t about that. Sure, it’s about finding something that’s transcendently, universally awful. But it has to be awful in a way that makes you smile, or at least smirk.
Thankfully, a man who goes by the name ZP Theart decided he’d had enough of fronting the guitar heroes in his supreme, high-BPM metal band Dragonforce three years ago, and is now fronting a new group called I Am I.

Let’s be real — if you ever listened to Dragonforce for anything other than the caffeinated guitars, you were doing it wrong. But our new friend ZP Theart doesn’t really realize that, and decided he needed to start a new solo project. How much ego is involved here? Well, said solo project is called I Am I.
It’s the exact same delusion of grandeur that made Tommy Wiseau such a wonderment with The Room, right down to the uncomfortably bad promotional art:

It’s not all misguided Photoshop filters and televangelist font choices, however. I Am I also have a new video for their track “See You Again.” Have you ever seen the creepy medieval choose-your-own-adventure show Knightmare? This video is vaguely reminiscent of that, though with less production value. Less production value than an obscure children’s show from the ’90s.

Opening with a spinning globe straight out of Encarta, the vid zooms in on the band, a series of dudes dressed in the universal outfit of “I.T. dudes out for the weekend” (barely buttoned dress shirts, loose and possibly leather jeans, platform-y boots). They power through the power ballad as if they have an audience, even though they’re actually just set up in the middle of a U.K. heritage site with no one watching them except for the six cameramen or whatever.

Our bud ZP Theart, boasting a black-dyed perm and collection of necklaces that’d make a Reno, Nevada Jack Sparrow impersonator jealous, passionately delivers his lyrics while the camera occasionally hints at the message printed on his jelly bracelet. I can’t quite make it out, but it ends with “my life?” which is certainly the subject you should be asking questions about if you’re a grown man playing fantasy metal to no one in the middle of a field.