Ringworm – Justice Replaced By Revenge

The first thing I thought when I saw this cd was,”Wow, Ringworm is an odd name for a band. I wonder if they know that it’s a fungus you contract from animals?” It just turns out they took their name from a Vincent Price movie. This album wasn’t that bad, although I was expecting much worse. The vocals aren’t that great (I guess they kind of grew on me, eventually), and I don’t exactly have high standards for a metal or hardcore band. But the guitarists are really good (one of them plays in Terror), they have some really good riffs and break into guitar solos in most of the songs. The drummer is really good as well, he keeps up a really quick beat and I’m sure I heard a cow bell in at least one song (cow bell will make any song better, that’s actually a lie, but it made at least one song better). The one thing I can never pick out in songs is the bass player, so I can’t even tell if he’s doing a good job, the rest of the band is far to overpowering. But on the plus side I haven’t heard many bands that sound that similar to this one, so I was quite surprised about that, usually every band has at least one clone.

Now for the songs, the album starts off with the song named after the cd, Justice Replaced By Revenge, its fairly mediocre. There’s nothing obviously special in the lyrics, they pretty much just talk about hurting people that hurt them (who would have thought they talk about revenge in a song named Justice Replaced By Revenge, not I). The first song pretty much sets the pace for the rest of the album, most of the songs are about a friend that might have turned their back on the band, or a record executive that screwed them over, or a bastardly stranger that stole the seat of one of the band members on the bus when they were five years of age. I don’t know, the lyrics give no real specifics, just how much hatred they all seem to share. So after listening to five identical songs, with a guitar solo thrown in once in a while, the album finally broke the cycle by putting in an instrumental song, which was alright (acoustic songs are never really that impressive). But to my dismay, the album picked up right where it left off and continued going on about all their angst and hatred filled lives.

I don’t know whether or not to recommend this cd to anybody, since you could easily just listen to them on purevolume and replay the two songs on there over and over again. That would be an easy way to get the idea of what this cd is like. So congratulations to Victory Records for making another mediocre record and then boasting abut how incredible it. If I’ve learned anything from looking up information on this band, its never listen to the descriptions given by Victory Records, they’re just a bunch of boastful assholes. Therefore I don’t recommend buying this cd unless you are actually willing to piss away money on something stupid. I couldn’t be more thankful that I finally finished this.