Megasus: Megasus (2009)
That discreet slice of orange on this otherwise standard-looking slab of black wax is your indication that I’ll be spinning a selection of orange and purple vinyl in the lead-up to Halloween.
Or, should I say, the culmination of ‘Halloween Season,’ for that’s what we’ve come to, people -- at least if you ask marketers and the kids who have been dancing to scary songs on TikTok since early September!
I stumbled upon Megasus’ attractively packaged (poster, patch, sticker, see above) self-titled LP in an L.A. record store for a very modest price, so I figured I’d take it for a spin (in a manner of speaking) based on the band’s clever moniker and the likelihood they’d play either stoner rock or dirty heavy metal.
I mean, how bad could it be?
And, at least based on the vicious, snaggle-toothed riffing of “Ten Kingdoms,” “Megasus,” and the tellingly named “Paladin vs. Berserker” (read on and I’ll explain), the group seemed competent enough to follow experienced war metal generals like High on Fire and Black Cobra onto the field of battle.
But that positive perception was quickly unraveled by a sequence of repetitive, unimaginative, over-long head-bangers like “Swords,” “Hexes/Szaadek,” and the stoner rock retread “Iron Mountain,” whose vain attempt to regurgitate Kyuss riffs really went too far.
What’s more, all of these amateurish blunders were capped by a frontman (to call him a “singer” would be misleading) whose shrill, annoying whine -- especially painful on “Red Lottery” -- proved, yet again, that it takes real talent to scream or grunt in tune.
So, I soon found myself asking, “who are these hacks and how did they score a record deal with the prestigious 20 Buck Spin?”
Well, turns out Megasus is ‘staffed’ by a bunch of part-time musicians, and full-time video game developers (told you the Dungeons & Dragons-related paladins and berserkers were a clue), employed at Harmonix, the creators of popular time-wasters like Rock Band and Guitar Hero!
Not that there’s anything wrong with that ... until I wasted $10 on their mediocre vanity project, but whatever: what’s done is done.
So, here’s to your continued success, boys, please don’t hack all my online accounts as retribution for this review!
More Third Millennium Metal: 3 Inches of Blood’s Battlecry Under a Winter Sun, Absent in Body's Plague God, Baroness’ Red Album, Behold! The Monolith’s Defender/Redeemist, Bison B.C.’s Dark Ages, Black Cobra’s Feather and Stone, Blue Aside’s The White Staff Burned by the Blue Sun, Bütcher’s 666 Goats Carry My Chariot, Drowning Pool’s Sinner, Ghastly’s Mercurial Passages, God Dethroned’s The Toxic Touch, High On Fire’s Surrounded by Thieves, Incursion’s Blinding Force, Inter Arma’s Paradise Gallows, Lair of the Minotaur’s The Ultimate Destroyer, Mastodon’s Leviathan, Oranssi Pazuzu’s Valonielu, Power Trip’s Nightmare Logic, Saviours’ Into Abaddon, Skeletonwitch’s Beyond the Permafrost, The Sword’s Age of Winters, Trivium’s Ascendancy, Ulthar’s Cosmovore, Unearthly Trance’s In the Red, Vattnet Viskar’s Settler, Vektor’s Terminal Redux, Warbringer’s War Without End, Zemial’s Nykta.
