This 'album' crams 13 songs into the shortest long player since the early days of Napalm Death. Each track is a blistering blast of heavy metal mayhem for the sampler generation, and a salute to short attention spans.
Speedcore spaz-metal seems to be the launching point for Cutting Pink With Knives, who have created an album where the average song is no more than a minute long. The ultimate love letter to conceptual and compositional efficiency, Oh Wow! has a singular purpose and direction and it executes its plan perfectly, and without an ounce of fat. I would have imagined that the gimmick of ultra short songs that all run together and are composed of hardcore drum blasts, speed-metal riffs, and insane mumble-screaming would get old quickly, but it never has time to. I was wondering when the first song would take a break from the relentless madness and when I checked in at the four minute mark, the disc was already on the fourth track!
There are some surprisingly musical moments in these songs; the places where the video game melodies complement the Marshall Stack arpeggios are particularly nice. The ultra-compressed, cut up drum samples are sometimes the only give away that this whole thing might be the product of a late night sample-binge into the world of cheesy metal records.
Oh Wow! winds up being the most absurd record I've heard all year, but also one of the most fun. It's a record that takes a single funny premise and beats it across the skull like a jackhammer. The last track doubles the album's running time with a final gag where a single guitar bit is looped over and over for ten minutes. It's now taken me almost twice as long to write this review of the album as it would have taken just to play it back in its entirety, but that's a good thing. Cutting Pink With Knives know just how far to push it and then just when to stop, making "Oh Wow!" a can't-miss addition to my collection.
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