Do you ever wonder what clowns are like? When they're at home, I mean. Making spaghetti bolognese for their family, doing the laundry, or watching the Great British Bake Off? These people who are professionally silly, in the moments where they're allowed to not be silly. I do all the time, really, and Separate Project by Vetticon got me thinking about it all over again.
The reason for this is that the description for the album reads "the debut solo album by Vetticon of TPCP and AOMBHN fame". It's admittedly pretty liberal use of the word "fame" but I had to investigate a bit more. These are both comedy grindcore bands, whose full names are The Poop Cock Project and Attack Of My Big Hairy Nuts, respectively.
The reason I had to investigate was because as I listened to the album, what I was hearing were very competently composed metal instrumentals, with what I'm pretty sure are sequenced drums and possibly sequenced bass, and while individually I thought they were all solid, there was a nagging feeling as the album went on.
I wish these were songs.
I wish there was a band.
So I had to find the band to get a sense of what I was missing out on. So I listened to Dragging My Pikachu By The Tail While Its Slowly Dying Of AIDS in Hopes Of Making It To The Pokecenter In Time by The Poop Cock Project, and Beveraged Driver by Attack Of My Big Hairy Nuts, to get a sense of what that might sound like. Those songs are both silly and as you may have guessed pretty juvenile, but there is a fun energy there that I found myself missing when listening to Separate Project.
That's not to say Separate Project is bad. There's a lot of stuff I really liked here. I think Dammit! is really cool, and Interlude.2 is legitimately quite beautiful and sombre. There's also the closing track, Example No. 35 which at 11 minutes I was dreading, but it's probably the best thing here. The riffs are great, and there's this switch up around the seven minute mark as the track slowly dismantles itself before reforming as something else entirely.
But at the same time, I can't help but feel like the album is fairly one-note, and I found it a bit of an exhausting listen. So I wanted to hear what Vetticon sounded like with a band. I'd love to hear Vetticon's instrumentals become songs with vocals. Meaningful songs that are about things other than Pokémon with serious diseases. And I get the sense that Vetticon would like that too. This is a serious album, I think, and presenting yourself sincerely like this takes guts, so I want to hear more of this side of Vetticon. I think it could be pretty special.