HUMA010
Five brand new magical tracks changing your perspective on punk & three Devo hits to top it off.

Jimmy/Anti said it best:

"Hey. No, no, stay here. Don't let that little cowpoke-groove at the start of the album scare you off. Ride it out. You're only a few seconds from getting your brain completely goopified. Trust me on this one.

Forbidden Wizards is a band that is just... marred by contradictions. When this band first popped up in my inbox, their cryptic, vaguely-medieval sounding name brought forth mental images of a black metal group hunched over in a wooded forest area, their hands clawing at the sky and faces adorned with freshly-applied corpse paint. To that I thought, "okay, sure". Then, I hit play on their album and was immediately presented with a hokey, twang-loaded melody that sounded cheesy even by a novelty act's standards. To that I thought, "...ooookay, sure". And then -- Forbidden Wizards happened. Like a freshly-punted hornets nest, violently swarming towards your ear canals with a frenzied spasm of six-stringed audio abuse, drumbeats firing away at your hearing receptors like a fully-loaded assault rifle, absolutely inundating the senses with a concentrated dose of musical chaos: to THAT, I thought... "OKAY YEAH SURE ABSOLUTELY".

Or, to put it bluntly, this album just blew me the fuck away. Forbidden Wizards is a band that hails from the Netherlands, and... uh... that's about all the information you're gonna be getting out of me. The band's lead made it a point to specify that they don't use a bio when reaching out to bookers and such. They just say "we make punk" music or whatever and leave it at that. So I'll go ahead and do the same. Forbidden Wizards make punk music. Really goddamn good punk music -- music that is, apparently, written about sitcoms. Don't know if that does anything for you. Described by the band as "Dead Kennedys meets Devo meets Forbidden Wizards" (the second of which having three of their songs covered on the tail-end of this album), "Married... With Spud" is an album that quickly unravels itself from its whiplash-inducing introductory tracks, making use of discordant, surf-like guitar arrangements that are very much in the vein of the aforementioned Dead Kennedys, further delineating the band's off-kilter influences that they proudly wear on their sleeves. With a pronounced vocal swagger, the lead writhes along to the deranged, circus-y melodies, concocting a perplexing mesh of rock and/or roll and post-punk experimentality, blasting with a ferocity that is both simultaneously tight and lacking in total control. The bass completely restless, always gestating, always pulsating with dissonant grooves, the drums wreaking aural havoc atop the expressive guitar hooks, the vocals exuding an extravagant sense of flamboyance. It's all so mesmerizing, and moreover, a ton of fun."