I was aware of GWAR for years before I ever heard a record. I probably heard a song or two, but it was much more snippets of them on late night music television. Something about them appealed to me.

But when I got around to actually listening to the band I started with America Must Be Destroyed. That’s a problem for my experience of this record simply because the next one is so much more musically ambitious than this one. It’s much more my cup of tea musically, which makes the rest of it a lot easier to take/enjoy.

But I am very much of the opinion that everything is released in time. All the reviews that judge pieces of art outside of historical context are inherently incorrect, even though that’s how we all want to judge them. I’m as prone to this as anyone so I’ve been fighting against that tendency in myself as soon as I became aware of it.

All of that is to say that, though this record is far less ambitious – and therefore far less appealing to me – than America Must Be Destroyed, I cannot hold that against this record because this record was and will ever be first.

Everything else about it is what you would expect if you know anything at all about this band: the music is louder but not so loud that it compares to where metal went in the 1990s; the lyrics are ridiculously offensive but (very) clearly in jest; some ideas are too focused on the lyrics rather than the music.  Oh, and the NWA parody is really funny and I recognized it as a hip hop parody basically immediately even though I don’t really know the exact song it’s attacking.

This is a fun, silly record that manages to be mostly musically compelling.

8/10