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Fat Day, "Unf! Unf!"

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I'm sitting here laughing my ass off at this record. It's 17 minutes,23 tracks in length, completely out of a control, and absolutelyhilarious. I've heard lots of thrash and smash musicians and I enjoy alot of their music, but every record I've heard that is bound anddetermined to rip through thirty songs in under half an hour have acertain attitude that doesn't warrant laughter. Fat Day are a bitdifferent; in between the 20 and 30 second songs on this disc arestrange eight-bit Nintendo sonatas. These little doodles of electronicbuzzery and near-organ origin provide little bits of relief from thedrum-banging, guitar-eating, vocal lacerations that are the rest of thealbum. It is, at times, impossible not to laugh at how silly this allis. Despite the fact that there are five tracks between the openingorgan piece and the second bit of relief on the album, it sounds asthough there is one song playing and it just happens to be riddled withsudden bleats of compositional hyperactivity and vomiting energy. I'mtrying to imagine what this band must look like on stage and all I cansee is the image of a head exploding or a cow being run over by amonster truck. Unf! Unf!isn't a particularly heavy album; there are certainly denser, morerhythmically tight songs out there. Fat Day, however, take that musicalnastiness and transform it into a spurt of energy so outrageous that itcan't be considered anything more than slap-stick. This is massivelyentertaining slap-stick, though. I've listened to this short and sweetrecord about five times in a row now and I haven't gotten sick of it.The honks and squeaks of the organ-like pieces always highlight somekind of insufficiency that reminds me of circus clowns or freak showsand the grating guitar, drum, and voice pieces always rock out in asatisfyingly primal way. I'm not sure how, but some of these tunes havegotten stuck in my head and I find myself half-gyrating in an attemptto reproduce the rhythms and half-melodies on some of the songs. If Ihad the ability to stop smiling and laughing while listening to therecord then I might actually attempt to bark along some of the lyrics,but it's just more fun to sit back and watch the insanity progress allby itself. - 

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