GWAR: Violence Has Arrived : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

Album Reviews

GWAR's exaggerated cartoon brutality, complete with futuristic, phallus-equipped cavemen lopping off heads and spewing blood and gunk all over the audience, was a genuinely funny art-project joke in the early Nineties. But it had been wearing thin long before September 11th, when violence really did arrive, making this album title more creepy than over-the-top. Always primarily a visual band, GWAR's shrieking-death-metal skills have improved almost to the point of competence -- they're as neck-snapping as Slipknot (an obvious protégé) on the hardcore "The Apes of Wrath" and "Beauteous Rot" (complete with whoa-whoa backing vocals). And as a bonus, you don't have to scour the lyrics worrying about whether rapped sentiments like "their femurs alone made a fine mountain" are serious. They aren't! Remember, these are art students. Where the Slipknot's Jason-masked frontman acts like he'd take a chainsaw to your arm, GWAR's vibe is clearly pure horror-movie kitsch.

STEVE KNOPPER
(November 5, 2001)