Holy Molar - Cavity Search
Reviewed by justin
We’ve reached an interesting point in our cultural progression where we can now safely and successfully market a genre like hardcore noise rock, which doesn’t even feign artistic difficulty, but instead actively seeks to offend every basic human understanding of sensory pleasure. If bands like The Locust and Los Crudos opened up the door for atonal disgust and scathing gross-out hate in the '90s, the past few years have unlocked the chest for their ironic reincarnation, and now bands like Holy Molar can release ten minutes of free association screaming about fucking Pocahotass and decapitating door knobs over thick synthesizers and crashing drums, and call themselves a post-hardcore comedy side project. The noise on Cavity Search isn’t cathartic, and it isn’t some intense pathos, nor does it expand the boundaries of what this kind of music can respectably pull off. Its function here is solely to divide the already apprehensive indie rock community into two camps; the one that will adore the sardonic contempt of its cheeky non-jokes, and the other that won’t get them. And that isn’t to say that Holy Molar doesn’t have its place, or that there’s nothing redeeming about music that punishes you for listening to it. There’s a whole chorus of greasy haired potheads in Cannibal Corpse t-shirts to whom this review doesn’t even apply; noise rock was created for people who like noise. But if we’re going to pretend that a band called Holy Molar, which writes two minute songs called “You've Had More Kids Pulled out of That Thing than a Burning Orphanage,” and plays shows dressed in dentist costumes, is anything more than campy shtick for a generation obsessed with hip, we’re going to have to allow hardcore an artistic license it doesn’t really deserve. Ostensibly, Cavity Search is quick, trashy thrash rock, and it beats chairs against the wall like a psychotic mass killer in an interrogation room, but it doesn’t ever stop grinning, and for that I gave it two points. On the other hand, I can’t think of any use for this record other than as a cultural marker for a wretched sociological experiment; in ten years will Holy Molar be awful, or will they just be lame? [www.threeoneg.com]