 The Webb Brothers
True story: I received The Webb Brothers Beyond the Biosphere as a gift from my cleaning lady. The gift was intended to keep me from firing her for never showing up to actually clean my apartment. And where did she get the CD? From the garbage of one of her other clients, who, according to my cleaning lady, is a big-time journalist for Rolling Stone. She's given me a lot of CDs from this person's garbage, and truly, that is where they all belong. For if something ends up in Rolling Stone's garbage, it must be real shit. And though I am no snob, I have very deep reservations about re-hiring my cleaning lady on the basis that she thinks the garbage of some two-bit freelance rock journalist is somehow a prize for a two-bit freelance marketing copywriter. Plus, anyone with access to the Internet would agree that we of the worldwide intelligentsia should not lower ourselves to get wrapped up in the petty social dramas of the underclass, such as, "Where will I sleep tonight?" and "I don't have any money for shoes." In fact, though I truly am no snob, those of the service industries such as cleaning ladies should not ever speak directly to, nor make direct eye contact with, we social overlords. For those grievous errors in judgement alone, poor, simple Conchetta (not her real name) must never darken our door again. My lord, this album sucks! The whole thing screams "marketing nightmare" from the get-go. The cover shows two very stoned-looking 20-something guys with long stoner hair wearing what appears to be fake jetpacks, running along a reddish fake Martian landscape to flee a fake tentacled robot, with a fake biosphere dome in the background. Obviously this is all fake, as the Webb Brothers are not wearing bio-helmets to protect their human skin and lungs from the harsh elements of Mars. Plus, the biosphere is way out of proportion to the human figures in the foreground. Any serious terraforming operation on Mars would require a biosphere easily twice the volume of the one shown here. And the robot pursuing them is just an inefficient variant on the old "Lost in Space" robot – the main difference being that this one can somehow fly in the near-Earth gravity of Mars without the help of massive thrusters, a magnetic levitation device, or an enormous heli-prop to counterbalance the furious winds that traverse the Martian surface. The addition of a back-cover photo of some kind of satellite tracking or uplink station on a lush green Endor-like planet, plus several interior photos of the Webb Brothers in their fake jetpacks, plus some fake-looking computer-generated scenes, all add up to a project that not only flies in the face of good space science, but seems too gimmicky to be taken as anything other than a painfully lame gimmick to trick consumers into buying what promises to be an upbeat, pop-y escapade into modern alt-techno-rock, but what is actually a downbeat, glacially-paced demo project by a couple of untalented stoners whose agents got way ahead of them and decided to turn them into unlikely pop stars. It is all that, and far, far less. Not a single track stands out among the droning, poorly-sung, half-structured mess. The Webb Brothers can't carry a tune, can't write lyrics, and don't know how to play musical instruments. Nine of the eleven tracks are the aforementioned downbeat, glacially-paced demo songs with no hook, terrible titles such as "The Filth of it All" and "Drink and Drown," crappy singing, and even crappier musicianship. Even the two faster tracks, "Cold Fingers" and "You Took It Wrong" are hideous, caterwauling, and impossible to sit through. The whole project is all the more unpleasant when you think that these guys got a record deal while other, far superior bands lie fallow – moldy and forgotten and unsung, incapable of getting out of bed in the morning from the sheer weight of life, and totally depressed at the prospect of their failed "careers." Hm, wait, maybe I was just talking about myself. Er, anyway, the only solace comes from the fact that now that they have a CD on a major label, what happens next for the Webb Brothers is basically nothing. They can go back to their urine-soaked flats in London and do drugs and continue making shit music. I'll continue to spit and piss on 'em no matter what.
Review by Crimedog |
