Album Review: Lordi - Screem Writer's Guild

Thank the... Lordi. After putting out an album that imagined Lordi having existed for fifty years, and then upping the ante by turning each of those singular experiments into their own albums, at least this is only a single album. Frankly, I got pissed off at Lordi for what they have been doing lately. There wasn't a chance in hell I was going to listen to a dozen albums of Lordi trying to be something they aren't. I don't get paid to do this, and that was the only way Lordi would ever be worth that much of my time.

The other thing about Lordi is that even when they are sticking to what they do best, I've yet to hear them deliver a full album that I can enjoy from start to finish. They are a singles band, which is fine, except for the fact they put out so many damn albums. Filler is more than filler when it makes up 90% of your total material.

Speaking of filler; On an album that is fourteen tracks long, Lordi opens things with more than a minute of build and noise you can't skip past, which just makes the first song a prime candidate to be skipped, even though it's pretty good. It's these sorts of decisions that make music so frustrating to listen to. I'm giving the band my time and attention, and they go out of their way to make it harder to enjoy the good parts of what they do. Since my patience gets shorter every year, I'm far more prone to hold this against the band, and it's not as if they're starting in my good graces to begin with.

Then after one track, we get a minute long spoken-word interlude. It's as if they are trying to piss me off, and it's working. I never understood why Bruce Dickinson put the one minute build track second on "Accident Of Birth", but I was able to get past that one, because it's a classic album where everything else absolutely slays. Lordi doesn't have that advantage. The first two tracks both push me away, and I know they aren't a good enough band to deliver ten great songs to win me back.

The other thing I find questionable is having the album more-or-less thematically dealing with classic horror movies. I get the Lordi schtick, but when Ice Nine Kills has been getting actual mainstream attention for doing the same thing with 80s slashers and the like, it almost feels like Lordi is trying to jump on the bandwagon. It's the wrong time for this particular theme, no matter how much it fits their aesthetic.

One the full album is absorbed, we're firmly in typical Lordi territory. There are a couple of really good chorus hooks, there's some campy fun, but most of the album slides in one ear and out the other, like a neti pot cleaning my head out of any memory of the band. Lordi is absolutely one of those bands that is enjoyable enough to listen to when the music is on, but who you never feel any pull at all to play when you aren't prompted to.

If you like hooky metal with these kinds of gurgling rough vocals, I would still recommend the album Apostolica put out over Lordi's work. It isn't as tongue-in-cheek, but it also doesn't have the annoyance factor. That's what always bugs me about Lordi; the nagging feeling they could do so much better if they just got out of their own way. They get swallowed up by their concepts, rather than just making great music, and it's led to them always being a disappointment. Here included.