Metal Underground.com

Wet Nightmare’s self-titled album comes courtesy of the Handshake Inc. label, which means that it’s available on the label’s Bandcamp in a name-your-price fashion. Those who read my On Pain Of Death’s “Year Naught Doom” review will get a sense of deja-vu, but who can resist albums where you can put whatever amount you want for a full album? Unlike the merits of “Year Naught Doom,” Wet Nightmare’s album is less than 15 minutes of shapeless grindcore that would be hard to justify with a price tag worthy of an LP, or even an EP for that matter.

This two-piece from Delaware doesn’t concern their audience with anything on a purely technical scale. They play fast, and they slow down from time-to-time, but that’s more of a lapse of judgment than anything premeditated. Vocals are incomprehensible grunting, so the lyrics don’t matter, and the band realizes this, as over half of the tracks are instrumental.

The problem with having so many instrumental tracks is that without vocals, the music is like a collection of demo tracks that were spiffed up and thrown onto the album. They are ideas - interesting ones scattered around - but ideas that aren’t fleshed out enough to be worth mentioning. The band pounds away for a minute, the song ends, and the next one does the same thing. A few samples on “Raped In The Superdome” and “Escalator Mutilator” bring something to the equation, but the band fails to expand on it. The sampling is window dressing instead of viable material to work from.

The sampling used could have been something effective, as could have a few of the outreaches away from the bile of standard grind. The band all of a sudden has new-found appreciation for tempo changes on “Idiocy Cocoon” and “Middle Finger Blues,” and though it is a bit of a reckless pace, at least it’s a change from the standard formula. These two guys can play the hell out of their instruments, if not in skill, then in shaky noisiness.

Grindcore fanatics will get their kicks out of a few tracks, and the name-your-price option gives this album validity compared to the amateurs who try to charge full price for their basement recordings. This falls on the lower end of grindcore though, and for all its speed and occasionally offensive lyrics and song titles, has nothing to say. Maybe that was the point; to just be sloppy and rude and ill-mannered with no substance. In that case, Wet Nightmare gets a gold star, but as a piece of legitimate music, their self-titled effort is just a vanilla release not worth its collective weight.