Every once in a while I come across a band who show obvious potential to be great, but do enough annoying shit in their music to make me want to throw bricks at them. New Jersey’s Bodies In The Gears Of The Apparatus just happen to be one of those bands. The musical approach they’ve taken is a fairly even mix of metalcore and grindcore bringing both good and bad elements of both genres into their music. They have plenty of light speed shredding and shrieking mixed with moshy breakdowns and barking, some good, some bad, basically any one element they pull off well on one song they do terribly on the next. For the most part the relentless speed aspects of the album completely suck. I remember being 3 years old sitting in my parents’ kitchen, banging on pots and pans with a wooden spoon as loud as I could while shrieking in the manner infants do. My parents considered it cute for the first 10 seconds, but soon after were ripping the spoon out of my hand and spanking my behind with it and sending me on my way. Why? Because mindless noise is annoying and the people who make annoying noises deserve a few quick cracks with a solid wooden object to make them stop, be it a wooden spoon, a baseball bat or a 2×4 with nails in it. The problem is when you overlap too many sounds at once, what comes out is a sound that is comparable in annoyance to say, the Emergency Broadcast Signal, fingers grating across a chalkboard and a dog licking it’s balls under the table while you’re eating. Where the band excels is during the breakdowns and tempo changes, and there are plenty of those spread throughout the 19 minutes of this release, and are actually incredibly catchy and worthy of a few rhythmic nods. The production on the effort is inconsistent, with one track sounding very clean and polished followed by a track that sounds like complete shit. The band also made an incredibly questionable move by including a boring 2 ½ minute sample immediately following the first track, the momentum the band had built up in the first track is completely taken away. The other samples are all relatively short and amusing, but eating up over 4 minutes with samples on a 19 minute release is pretty stupid, even goregrind bands have a limit for that sort of thing. The band sound pretty tight and they have decent technical ability, although the drums are a little sloppy at times and the vocals are somewhere between okay and annoying enough that you want to Nancy Kerrigan the singer’s trachea. The band does have the potential to create something really good, but they just aren’t there yet. I’d say wait for their full length release before you start contemplating spending your money on them. On the whole, they’re better than most bands I’ve heard coming from America’s Armpit, but when your competition is Pyrexia and Burnt By The Sun, that isn’t really saying much. I still firmly believe that the only good thing to come out of Jersey is stuffed in the back of Vida Guerra’s tight jeans, and that, my friends, is something I think we can all safely agree on. Written By: Teufel