Look, for ease of argument, let’s lump rock, metal, punk, alternative and everything in between into a catch-all term that we’ll call ‘the aggressive music community.’ It seems high time, not only with the success of this EP from Bloody Beetroots, but with the prominence over recent years from acts like Dampf, Zardonic and the resurrected Nine Inch Nails, that the aggressive music community come to recognize that electronic music will have a hand in the genre going forward. Best to embrace it now.
What stands out the most about all of these compositions is the way in which Rifo (the man behind The Bloody Beetroots,) uses his unique touch to accent and enhance the songs. It’s not a delicate touch - Rifo’s hand overwhelms each track when his particular flavor of sound hits - but that’s what makes the EP work. Where Rifo shows restraint is in the measures where he takes his hand away completely.
There’s going to be a lot of backhanded commentary coming, apologies in advance. Focusing for a moment on the single “NUMB” that features Tokky Horror, the first forty-five seconds is a perfectly average alternative rock song. And then it explodes. The juxtaposition of noise level (and bass level) is the kind of switch-throwing that makes Forever Part One work so well. Two worlds are colliding in a way that’s both refreshing and unique. Add in the fact that Rifo stays his hand and only brings his electronic wall full bore during the choruses (and the thunderous outro,) and he, in conjunction with the band, has made something special.
This theme extends for the duration of the experience. There’s nothing that would truly draw a listener into the basic premise of “I’m Not Holy” until the song breaks out into a dance hall thumper (one is reminded ever so slightly of the opening of season 2 of The Venture Bros, which featured the Aquagen song “Everybody’s Free.”) The same applies towards the end of the EP with the song “Free,” which builds and builds until it eventually sounds like the best moments of a Streets of Rage soundtrack. This is the kind of thing electronic music has been mastering over the last, oh, say four decades or so; the ability to slow build until the tension becomes burgeoning to the point that catharsis is all that’s left. To hear that applied to aggressive music is a touch that’s been…’missing’ is the wrong word, but underutilized, for sure.
Spend some time with this. Soak it in. There’s a lot to like, both in the pleasure-of-listening sense (the bass alone will make you feel something,) and in the academic sense (the ongoing fusion of aggressive music and electronic dance music, which is a separate breed entirely from industrial.) If we endeavor as music fans to grow and find new avenues for our fandom, then the Bloody Beetroots is offering something novel and different for us to imbibe.
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