Eat Shit is just over five minutes of some of the most angry music I have heard in a long time. Although I didn't expect myself to say this for a long long time, this demo is so angry that it is refreshing. Arsonist is a genuinely pissed off band with something to say, along the lines of classics like Dropdead and Siege. What this band is not, however, is "pissed off" in the way that a crybaby metalcore band supposedly is, when in reality they are just worried that their size 0 women's jeans are making them look fat.
Anyway, back on topic. Arsonist, while being as righteously pissed as any mile-a-minute powerviolence band, also has a healthy dose of d-beat influence. In the true hardcore tradition, all five songs on Eat Shit range from about forty-five seconds to a minute-and-a-half, but manage to pack in savage d-beat sections, stop-start diatribes against society, short interludes of guitar noise, and a few groovy mid-paced parts. Fortunately, Arsonist can resist the urge to turn the mid-paced parts into huge breakdowns that wear out their welcome, which are commonplace in hardcore.
The lyrics are refreshingly straight-to-the-point and highly polarizing. My personal favorites are these excerpts from "Rich and Fucking Up the Program:"
Nothing really matters in your empty fucking head / Daddy's little girl should have killed herself instead / Your morals of living won't last you very long / Parents raised you completely fucking wrong.
and "Let Down:"
I can live without friends / Because friends just let me down / I don't need your money / I always end up broke / Your economy isn't doing good / America's a fucking joke / Wealthy spit on me / I'm richer in the head / I don't fucking go to school / I read books instead.
Although Eat Shit is very brief, that works with this kind of music. The approach is get in, kick some ass and take some names, and get out before anyone knows what happened; and I can respect that. Sometimes all one needs is a five-minute catharsis, and this demo will do the trick. The d-beat/grind approach to hardcore and prominent lack of chugging make this album stand out way more than it would have if it were just another one of those pile-on-and-sing-along-oriented chugfest hardcore albums that have been so popular in recent years.
For a demo, Eat Shit has fairly good sound quality: you can actually hear the drums and bass, the guitars are well defined, the vocals aren't too high or low in the mix, and overall there is room for every instrument in the mix. At the same time, this isn't some pro-tooled, copy-and-pasted, digital-sounding demo either. It sounds raw, vicious, spontaneous, and overwhelming. In other words, Arsonist knows what punk is supposed to sound like. I don't know if the band plans on ever recording anything else, but Eat Shit is a welcome addition to my d-beat/powerviolence/punk collection.
