I WONDER IF THEY USE BLOODY PANDA TO TORTURE PRISONERS?

Vince and I went with the Metal Injection dudes to check out A Life Once Lost at the warm-up gig they did on Monday night at Lit Lounge. I don’t have much to say about ALOL; anyone who has heard their most recent release, Iron Gag (read our review here), or any of their other albums for that matter, knows that these dudes rock, and you should go see them when they come to your town with Walls of Jericho and Suicide Silence (get a complete list of tour dates on ALOL’s MySpace page).

But I have to say something about Bloody Panda, the band that opened the show: I’ve heard nothing but good things about this band, and maybe I just wasn’t stoned enough to appreciate them, but they sounded like some punishment sent from God – and no, I don’t mean that as a compliment.

I don’t give a shit that Bloody Panda have a gimmick (the dudes in the band all wear executioner’s masks, the lead singer is an Asian chick whom they apparently sometimes pretend to torture) – lots of really good bands have gimmicks, so whatever, that shit doesn’t bother me.

I do give a shit that this band’s music is just endless droning with nothing resembling so much as a proper riff, let alone a hook. And I don’t mean cool droning, either – this isn’t kinda ambient like Minsk or shoe-gazey like Jesu or distortion-as-art like Rwake; as a friend put it, “The band perpetually sounds like they’re just about to start playing.” Every song (I’m assuming there were multiple songs – it all sounded pretty much the same to me) sounds like an intro; it always feels like the plane’s about to take off, but all it ever does is circle around the runway before coming to a complete halt. The band classifies themselves as “doom metal,” but, really, that’s just a way for them to shit in their hands and throw it the face of the dudes in Candlemass, Solitude Aeturnus, and other, actual doom metal bands.

No, Bloody Panda is not doom metal. They’re just shit.

-AR

If for some reason this article compels you to visit Bloody Panda’s MySpace page, then I have failed miserably as a writer, a metal fan, and a human being in general.