Jeff Walker und Die Fluffers, Welcome to Carcass Cuntry

I’ve been hearing a lot of noise about grindcore lately, and I have to say that there’s nothing wrong with the genre; if you like screaming and guitars that sound like grinding metal, then it’s gravy. Jeff Walker pioneered the genre with his band Carcass, and thanks to H.I.M., Napalm Death, and other bands like them, grindcore has since come into its own as a distinctive genre within the milieu of hardcore music. That same Jeff Walker has taken a break from the grind to release a new album, Welcome to Carcass Cuntry, that’s crammed full of spankin’ new covers of ancient country hits, including “Sunday Morning Coming Down,” “Rocky Mountain High,” and “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry.”

Unfortunately for Walker, however, the album is weak and sad like the country songs that he tries to reproduce. Sometimes people should just not cross genres. Despite a list of guests that includes members from Faith No More, Amorphis, Napalm Death, and more, the songs are slow, plodding, artless, boring, unemotional, powerfully overproduced, and overstocked with zombified guitars. Delicate songs are pompously textured with coarse distorted guitar, matched by Walker’s own brusque vocal style, which reminds one of Dwight Yoakum’s character in Sling Blade twenty years and a million hangovers down the line. As the singer himself puts it, “the recording ranges from some of the best vocals I’ve probably ever done, to the worst, but it’s all about the spontaneity…” Anyway, I don’t hate or love this album, but I’ll probably never listen to it again, if that tells you anything.