MAXIMUM MONEY MONSTER

In my experience with avant-garde or experimental music of virtually all varieties, there is music that I may despise at first, but slowly grows on me, revealing new things to me, the listener as I invest more time and thought into it. With this precedent in mind, I will often give these more adventurous artists a fair bit more time to figure out if I like them than the typical band, who may generally sound enough alike stuff I have heard before to make a fairly painless judgement. With quite a bit of 'strange' music that I don't quite understand at first, I may not always come to love it, but at the very least, I find a greater appreciation for the album as time goes on.

This unfortunately, is not one of those albums.

Zeni Geva are a heavy metal band for Japan who, among other things, can be said to have a fairly unique sound to them. To my ears, it crosses me as being some sort of hybrid of freaky Japavant quirk and classic thrash metal, and there have been times when I have liked the music that the band makes. After all, especially in a day and age where there are virtually millions of bands out there, a little originality goes a long way. Sadly, the musical enjoyment is not here on 'Maximum Money Monster', and there are quite a few things I likely would have rather listened to than this.

What we have here is fairly functional, yet generally subpar guitar riffs that are reminiscent of thrash or even punk music being monotonously repeated throughout each track. On top of that, we have the wailing Samurai yells of vocalist KK Null, who is above and beyond the most distinctive and enjoyable aspect of this band. His diverse style of singing and shouting gives Zeni Geva a very Japanese sensibility to them naturally, and its such a shame that there is such uninspired songwriting and execution to go along with it.

To Zeni Geva's credit, the guitar riffs are given a slightly twangy tinge to them that somehow reminds me of Voivod, but this is largely where my compliments end. Largely, its not even the quality of the riffs themselves- which are nothing spectacular- but rather the way they are used. The sixteen minute 'Slam King' should be a perfect way to illustrate this. Throughout most of this plodding monster, one singer riff is repeated, with the vocalist doing the same chant overtop. While I get the picture that is meant to be 'hypnotic' or whatever, it is really, really not working for such a raw and filthy sound. There is virtually no sense of build up, nothing to justify sitting through all of it.

While the other tracks here are much shorter, they generally follow the formula of monotony, taking riffs that weren't even that great to begin with, and then overusing them to the point of nausea. I would stay away from this one.