Album Review: Lawnmower Deth - "Blunt Cutters"

Now here's a name I've not seen for a bit. Twenty years before Evil Scarecrow first suited up in their Halloween costumes to play a gig, there was Lawnmower Deth - arguably the silliest and funniest comedy thrash band there ever was. Now in 2022 after a near three decade gap, we finally get the band's fourth album (the group originally split up in 1994 following the release of album number three Billy which featured them turning in covers of Kim Wilde's Kids In America and Squeeze's Up The Junction that none who heard them are likely to forget in a hurry but reformed in the late noughties and have been going strong ever since).

Basically, Blunt Cutters is everything you'd want a Lawnmower Deth album to be - supremely silly song titles like Space Herpes, Bastard Squad and Now He's A Priest, odes to going shopping in Hell (Power Bagging) and collecting bobbleheads (Bobblehead funnily enough) thirty second blasts of aggression called things like Swarfega, Good Morning Phil, Goodnight Bob and Christ Options and a general air of enjoyable daftness all round. Yet the ace up Lawnmower Deth's sleeve has always been that they're a more musically adept group than they're often given credit for and there's plenty of that in evidence here - Deth! Maim! Kill! and Nothing But Noise have some supremely tight riffs which buzz around your head like a swarm of angry wasps in the best early Metallica style. Most surprising of all is the five minute closer Agency of C.O.B. which goes into almost doom metal territory with its ominous grinding riff and even includes a string section yet somehow still works.

All in all, this is a good comeback effort from Lawnmower Deth. Yes, they're still the same self-professed "metal bozo clowns" that those who remember them from the early '90s will recall and long may it be so but there's plenty of tricks and twists on here that provide ample proof that they certainly aren't as daft as they may look. Recommended.

NITE SONGS RATING: 🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌔🌑🌑 (8/10)