Entry 059: Pitbull Daycare Discogrophy

Dear Internet,

                I mentioned a few entries ago about a friend of mine who would ask me to find music for him.  This occurred a number of times, so I have accumulated a few albums that would fit his tastes a lot more than my own.  Pitbull Daycare would have to be one of those groups.  There is no way that I would have gathered their three albums together or even listened to them if my friend did not ask for my assistance

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                Pitbull Daycare was a Texas based electronic industrial metallic punk rock band.  If you can saw that all out loud, try swallowing it next.  The nature of the music from their albums was not eclectic, which one might assume with that first line about their genre.  No, the band played exactly electronic industrial metallic punk rock music, and they played it often.  They made three albums before their apparent disassembly.  I was able to find an official Myspace page for the band, but the group has not logged on for almost three years now.  The three albums were "Six Six Sex" (1998), "Unclean" (2004), and "You, Me, and the Devil Makes Three" (2006).  As you can tell by the titles of the albums, the group heavily pushes their songs to the depressing, darker themes.  Listening to the sings themselves, one realizes that the band has "edge" to them.  In fact, there is so much "edge" in these songs that it makes a truncated cuboctahedron look like a two sided dice.

                When I began to listen to the albums in the order of publishing today, I was reminded of how my friend had described the band and their songs.  It was something like "Music to be downright be pissed off to."  That pretty much sums it up, but I suspect that you want to know a little more than that.  Between the three albums, the majority of the songs are very similar.  It is to the point that nothing changed over the course of the eight years from the first album to the third.  I can make sweeping generalization about the band because they were stagnant for the entire time.  The problems of the first album spilled over into the next.  It became a constant repetition through the three albums that only when the band tried to do anything different did they actually succeed.  

                The albums are filled with elements of the various genres that I mentioned earlier.  These genres do have distinct sound to them despite being closely related.  Electric will be filled with synthesizers and computer made sounds.  Industrial will include rhythmic beats that sounds more in place at a steel mill than in a song.  Metal can be directly tied to industrial as an influence if not a parent genre.  Punk and rock go hand in hand in most cases.  A band can belong to one group and not another, although I imagine they would most likely all be grouped under "rock" at a store.  Pitbull Daycare makes use of all these genres all of the time.  A song will start off with an electronic melody or random synthetic sounds, and then it will make way for the industrial percussions, which will lead into the metal guitar riffs, which overshadow the punk lyrics.  Eventually the song will reach a closing point where everything becomes mute short of the electronic sound samples.  About 80% of the songs on the three albums play like this.  The songs are painfully repetitive once they actually begin.

                The lyrics of the songs are not going to win any awards.  A number of the songs just constantly repeat the same four or five words over and over.  Most if not all of the songs are depressing, moping, pity party songs.  That is except for the rage filled ones throwing insult upon a supposed third party.  I do not mind songs about a cheating woman or about some other calamity thrown upon the unsuspecting fool.  I love old county-western songs.  Pitbull Daycare, however, does very little to make one song feel unique against its peers.  There are a few lyrics at the beginning, but they all stand aside for the two minutes of insult throwing, which is screamed out.  The benefit of making screaming lyrics is that there are no notes to hit.  There is no melody to keep the screams within a specific range.  It is all just shrill sounds.  It takes no skill to scream at the top of your lungs, only to cream longer and louder than others.  

                The only times that I found the tracks good was when they were covering songs from other bands.  "Sheer Heart Attack," "Ace of Spades, "It's the End of the World As We know It (And I Feel Fine)" are all well done.  The band's take on each one feels unique because they are applying a plethora of genre techniques to songs that have proven their worth and ability.  On top of that, those same techniques work very well for those selected songs.  That is another thing that the band does seem to do well.  The instrumentals are well done to the point that the lyrics are in the way.  Even the ways the levels are mixed place the words well behind the guitars and drums.  If the albums were composed of more cover versions, I might have liked them better.  

                The only thing that I can do is highlight the few songs that I liked, which were "Hold On" and "No Compromise."  The rest, like I said, are repetitive angst filled tracks that would appeal mostly to teenagers.  Maybe after finally getting through these albums I should wonder about the musical tastes of my friend.  I can question the compatibilities of our tastes, however.  It really is not much of surprise that Pitbull Daycare was only around for a little while and never quite got above a limited level of popularity.  There are plenty of indie, underground, or amateur bands around that can learn a few genre techniques and spit out mediocre albums.  A listener might be willing to have a go at these albums, maybe even work out to the hard hitting beats and shredding guitar riffs, but listening to these songs on headphones or ear buds will make their lackluster lyrics seep through, and listening to this on a speaker system will get you stares and maybe a knock on your door by the landlord.  The whole thing is stuck in the middle, between problems that come from a mess of genres and actual skill with the instruments.

Yours in digital,

BeepBoop

P.S. Next will be "1001 Nights" (1969).

Edit: The next Backlog item is incorrect and is addressed about in the next entry.