Dwarves - Dwarves Must Die

  by Daniel Cressey

published: 15 / 3 / 2005

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Review

More adolescent punk-ness from the US rockers the Dwarves. Nothing has really changed in this latest album. Most of the songs are still about sex and how goddamn cool they think they are. In fact 'The Dwarves Must Die' features a level of self-appreciation normally reserved for hip-hop albums. At various points lead singer ‘Blag the Ripper’ declares “I am the dominator, leader of the pack”, “I’m a sexual genius”, and “We are the original masterminds, the only scene.” Where in the past this self-lauding, however, has been enough '...Must Die' find the Dwarves a bit angry at various people. “I wanna crush kill destroy the new youth dude,” runs ‘Demented’. And ‘Massacre’ takes swipe at Good Charlotte and other “fake punkers with their pussy ass managers”. While slightly amusing the rather poor rapping on this track makes it less than classic. Blag’s pop at the “Queens of the Trust Fund” is the best part of it: “You slept on my floor, now I’m sleeping through your motherfucking records.” Josh Homme’s response was apparently a rather amused comparison of Blag to Vanilla Ice, Snow and Rip van Winkle. For sheer audacity this album scores highly. It’s hard to imagine many bands would have enough balls to feature Dexter Holland on an album berating “fake punkers” and sellouts. 'The Dwarves Must Die' might not surpass their previous offerings – which included the superb 'Come Clean' – but in places it equals them. ‘Salt Lake City’ is almost as catchy as their previous pop-hit, lesbian-ode ‘Better be Women’. And ‘Downy Junior’ – with its “Corruption of the youth, annihilation of the rest” mission statement – is nearly as much a driving force as highlight of 'Come Clean', the sonic amphetamine of ‘River City Rapist’. At only seconds over a half hour long, this isn’t big, it’s certainly not clever and it’s not really that accomplished. But it is fun, and there are plenty of worse ways to spend 30 minutes and 39 seconds.

Track Listing:-

1 Bleed On
2 Fefu
3 Salt Lake City
4 Dominator
5 Demented
6 Blast
7 Like You Want
8 Relentless
9 Massacre
10 Runaway #2
11 Go!
12 Another Classic
13 Christ On A Mic
14 Downey Junior
15 The Dwarves Must Die