Timōrātus—My Life in a Made Metal Band (2022)

Details

Released by Timōrātus on Mythic Panda Productions on 10 June 2022.

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Band

Courtney ‘The Style’—Vocals
David ‘The Party’—Vocals
Logan ‘The Redneck’—Guitar
Mason ‘The Kid’—Drums
‘The Mystery’—Bass

Tracks

We made it (03:59)
Too famous (03:42)
Fan trouble (03:28)
Better than you (04:10)
Best show pt 2 (03:06)
Band briefing (02:19)
Can’t keep up (04:33)
Lonely (04:36)
Record reckoning (03:41)
We blew it (03:50)
Sorry (03:27)

Review

The follow up to 2020’s My Life in a Mediocre Metal Band, My Life in a Made Metal Band is another album filed under the genre of ‘comedy metal’ – is that a thing?. Now their epic journey continues as they hit the pinnacles of fame and musical brilliance. This is the other side of the coin, the story of what happens when a band’s inherent genius is recognised and they reap the rewards that their incredible music deserves.

I’m a big fan of Spın̈al Tap—heck! after I saw the documentary, nay rockumentary for the first time, I thought they were a real band and went to my local record store to look for their albums. I’ve even seen them perform live at Wembley Stadium at the Freddie Mercury Tribute Concert in 1992 (“Goodnight Wimbledon!”) I’m also a moderate fan of Bad News, the fictional English heavy metal band created for the Channel 4 television series The Comic Strip Presents… and whose first album was produced by Queen’s Brian May.

But I just didn’t get this.

The history of Timōrātus is interesting, you can read about it on Wikipedia. It began as a solo project of David Napier in 2006 and had a very electronic slant. Fast-forward eight years, the band had morphed into a metal band and released a series of EPs whose titles describe the metal sub-genre—Black (2014) Death (2014), Doom (2015), Grind (2015).

This album combines a number of Fear Factory style, electronic-infused death metal songs with three scripted scenes that are supposed to carry the story and presumably the humour of this now established band reaping the rewards of their success. Only, I didn’t find any of it amusing I remember reading once that Americans find humour in success, while the British find it in failure. Perhaps this is an example of that. Perhaps also being unable to make out the lyrics clearly lost a lot in translation.

Looking at the music alone, it’s a decent metal album if a little death-metal-by-numbers. A few of the tracks have a distracting earth-buzz throughout the tracks which constantly made me switch off the music to test if there was a problem with my computer’s soundcard and speakers. Maybe that’s where the comedy lies in this release?

Conclusion

As a metal album, it was decent background music although I found the three spoken tracks distracting. As a comedy metal album, though, for me at least this failed to live up to its genre title. I simply didn’t find it funny and there wasn’t enough to capture my imagination—sorry.

Review score: 55%

Disclosure

Imperative PR contacted me inviting me to preview Timōrātus’s latest album, which I was delighted about.

I have no connections to either Imperative PR or Timōrātus. I’m not being paid to review this. But I did get a free digital copy of the album to review which is pretty cool.

Many thanks to Imperative PR, and to Timōrātus for continuing to create fresh new music.