Fatal Flying Guilloteens, Quantum Fucking

Sweet Jesus. I’m having a real hard time digesting the fact that Quantum Fucking is now officially the Fatal Flying Guilloteens’ tenth release. I was almost positive the ground would open up and swallow the band whole before the universe would allow that much Guilloteens-ness to exist in the world. Damn… The album pretty much picks up where the Guilloteens’ last album, Get Knifed, left off, eschewing the sloppy garage-ness of years past in favor of a tight, tight, tight, math-rock-y/NYC noise hybrid that doesn’t careen drunkenly around the room so much as step straight in and punch you in the face, hard.

Which is a good thing, believe it. Because over the span of their ridiculously long life, the band has dialed in what they do so it’s a damn science, and crafting it into something heavy and sharp and jagged; it’s amazing to experience, but dangerous at the same time. “Reveal The Rats,” Quantum Fucking‘s first “single,” such as it is, lays out the band’s cunningly devised gameplan: the Roy Mata’s bass and John Adams’s drums drive on through like a freight train, knocking you off your feet and keeping you down while Brian McManus (who’s since left the band and been replaced by Bring Back the Guns’ Erik Bogle) and Shawn Adolph’s guitars chime, scrape, and screech, almost Yeah Yeah Yeahs-style, over your head and singer/drummer Mike Bonilla (both he and Adolph tackle the vocal duties on this one) rants and spits about extermination. Despite the song’s title, by the way, I honestly can’t tell if Bonilla’s singing about killing off actual rats or snuffing out people. Ah, fun.

The rest of Quantum Fucking follows suit, for the most part. Tracks like “Charts,” “The Siren,” “Fantasy Licks With Platinum Ceiling,” and “Hello, Boss!!!” are intense, churning, and desperate, the soundtrack to a too-late night of paranoia, self-mutilation, and bad speed; the lone “melody” on here, such as it is, appears briefly in “Illegal Weapons Party,” probably the least-menacing song on the disc. It’s weird to say, too, but with this album the band’s really hit the mark in terms of the actual songs and not just the sound. While I’m definitely very fond of the Guilloteens’ older stuff (the one concession to the “old” FFGs sound is “Tiger vs. Gator,” midway through the album), Quantum Fucking may be their first real “album,” the first collection of tracks that seems to hold together. Best of all, it’s one that seems to hold up well even after repeated listenings.

There are resemblances to a ton of like-minded people scattered throughout — “Great Apes” plays like an amped-up Frodus track (especially towards the end, with the “The apes, they’re here / They walk among us / We made them!” bit), “Non-Original Talent” at times sounds like a distant cousin to June of 44, and several other tracks bring to mind Polvo, Nomeansno, Hella, or Out of the Races and Onto the Tracks-era Rapture. In the end, though, it’s all Guilloteens, and fuck the comparisons. These guys have gone from being a gimmicky-yet-fun joke band to one of those bands other bands get compared to, and that’s no mean feat.