Lifes

Lifes: Treading Water

Triple Eye Industries/Middle Man Records/Knochen Tapes/Here and Now! Records

28 June 2019

Lifes is a Wisconsin, U.S.A. bass-drum-and-scream tag team with a specialty in transferring the anger, rage and frustration of modern life (stress, marriage, kids, spouse, school, work, no chocolate cookies, unemployment, politics, no money, no fans, no gigs, band frustrations, bad cereal, obesity, too many raccoons, not enough raccoons, not enough potatoes in the salad, and about 37 thousand other things) into a concoction of punk-scream-noise that will make you wonder if this band is trying to make Slayer seem like One Direction because there are 18 attempts to destroy Western music as we know it, and by George, they might just succeed in coming up with some of the rudest bass-and-drum noise this whole summer of 2019. Unlike BTS or Slayer, you can’t sing along to this because there’s no singing, just screaming and more screaming, so you can scream along to it, and if you don’t remember the lyrics, that’s ok because you just growl along to the barrage of noise, and you be ok. They have a song, and we’re using the term song very loosely here, called “Base Level Decency Isn’t Decent Enough,” which also makes you wonder: Who are they screaming about, actually? Their music (again, using the term very loosely) is rude, crude, savage and profane so that even the Slayer fans are going to say, “Man, that’s too noisy, dude, please turn it down!,” and the Wisconsin band itself is a rather obnoxious team of mayhem, and we would tell you what the second song is called but it’s too indecent to write it down. Kerry King believes that he makes aggressive music, but he has no idea that Lifes is making thrash, grindcore and static noise sound too melodic. Remember, kids, there are no guitars here. Bass. Drums. Scream. Random sampled sounds. Here’s a brilliant idea. The Green Bay Packers have been sucking it up for years and Aaron Rodgers is not getting any younger, and we’re still waiting on more championships, so why don’t we have the Packers listen to Lifes before every game so that they come out on the field and have some violent fun and play like a bunch of crazed dogs, baby, ready to take any bear, lion, viking, giant, seahawk, ram or pirate that crosses their way, given that these Wisconsinites have found that sweet spot between total rage interpreted on bass and drums, on the one hand, and the point at which their anger will land them in jail, on the other. Finally, kids, these lunatics want you to know that in the 1980s there were some very nice girls named Natalie, Jo, Tootie and Blair, amongst others, and they were a great group of friends who studied and played together, and talked, fought and made up because in every episode of the sitcom they discovered some very important facts of life upon realizing that in life you take the good, you take the bad, you take them both and there you have the facts of life, the facts of life, and would you believe the genius humor of this Wisconsin rageholics that they have a seven-second cover of the theme song of the famous sitcom? The apocalypse cannot come soon enough, kids, and if you can do anything to help it arrive, then right now would be about that time to do your thing and make it happen so that the world can finally hear what form the destruction of music will take because it’s not going to come in the form of ghouls and zombies and orange pumpkins running down ruining our bowling games, it’s going to take the form of two balding dudes from Wisconsin. Please help. If you can read this then you are driving too close and you better back off.

tripleeye.bandcamp.com/album/treading-water

middlemanrecords.storenvy.com/collections/38349-all-products/products/26125677-lifes-treading-water-lp

hereandnowrecords.bandcamp.com/album/treading-water

knochentapes.bandcamp.com/album/lifes-treading-water