This week Matt dissects Spyder Baby (no it’s not a typo)

Just when things were beginning to get stale with the horrorpunk genre along came the 80’s glam-inspired stylings of The Newlydeads, Wednesday 13, The Peppermint Creeps, Seraphim Shock, and Ironhead among others. And now as we reach the terminus of all the genre has to offer comes Spyder Baby. Fashionably late, but late all the same.

As where the other horror rock acts I referenced earlier took their cues from the wanton tastelessness exemplified by Marilyn Manson’s Portrait of an American Family, took it in a blatant horror direction and added a cock-rock veneer, Stevie Banch (lead singer and creative force behind the band) did just the opposite with Spyder Baby and went in for the big, slick production values and industrial-metal bombast of Manson’s Antichrist Superstar and slathered on a heaping helping of horror tropes to top it all off.

Let Us Prey is largely comprised of reissued material from their earlier Bugs Crawl In album with a few new tracks tossed in for good measure.

The first sign of trouble you’re likely to notice is that there’s a lot of lyrical repetitiveness. And I mean a lot. There are a good couple of songs where the last minute consisted of the same lyric sung over and over. This leaves the listener feeling unfulfilled and if I may be so bold, more than a little cheated. Well don’t just take my word for it, here’s Stevie in his own words in a selected snippet from Bitter:

If there was a way
I could be so sweet
Then all you happy ones
Would just seem oh so neat
Think I’ll just stay
Bitter (repeated 7x)

And there ain’t a whole lot of lyrical depth to be had here anyway. Like Rob Zombie, Stevie patterns his songs around a single half-conceived idea or cleverly morbid distortion of age old nursery rhymes. And like Zombie I suspect that most of the lyrics mean absolutely nothing to anyone outside of the one who wrote them. Indeed most of the lyrics appear to be of a highly personal nature, detailing personal trauma or feelings of alienation. And believe me, there’s enough angst here to make Dave Gahan stop hinting at committing suicide and actually do it. It seems to me at least that the horror elements hinted at are less literal and really meant more for metaphorical purposes, a way of relating these complex emotions which drive the music. But the obtuse lyrics, the ad nauseum repetitiveness of them, and the fact that they’re couched in a somewhat trivial device all combine to make Let Us Prey one tough pill to swallow.

But lest you think it’s all bad news, there is a silver lining. Or silverish at least. The music itself as I outlined before takes on a more progressive industrial bent. It’s more in the vein of the new wave industrial, which is to say lots of grinding rhythm guitar surging above a simple framework of throbbing bass and rapid-fire percussion with some cursory programming thrown in just for good measure. All this is presided over by Stevie’s vox, alternating between a harsh, shredded schreech and choked, threatening whispers.

Some of the stand-out tracks on the album are Watch You Die which kicks off the proceedings with a manic ferociousness, Bugs Crawl In which takes The Hearse Song (although it’s really hard to put the word “snout” in any kind of context which still allows you to sound cool doing it) as its motif, a theme which is revisited later in the album on the appropriately downbeat The Worms. And there’s even a hidden track which is a cover of Ministry’s Everyday Is Halloween. It’s practically worth getting just for that track alone if only so you can finally have a version of the song that you can play in mixed company without somebody piping up “Okay, what the hell is this we’re listening to?”

All things considered, I liked Let Us Prey. I just didn’t love it. There were the makings of a good template evident in it and I will continue to hold out hope for future releases by the band. But for now I think this is one Baby that needs to spend a little more time incubating in its egg sack.