Let’s not kid ourselves: Buzzov-en is slow, depressing, and metal. Those are three characteristics that I seldom look for in music, and it would take an extraordinary band to overcome that. And that’s exactly what Buzzov-en is: an extraordinary band. There’s plenty of dumb adjectives that you could use to describe them (sick, gnarly, brutal), but they all seem to fall short because this band really pulled from a deeper well. The vocals are some of the nastiest ever committed to tape; it’s like that movie Gremlins crossed with Sam McPheeters vomiting in an alley. The music… well, I already said it’s slow, depressing, and metal. I think that if you drew a straight line from Black Flag to His Hero Is Gone, Buzzov-en would be somewhere in the middle of that line. Anyway, this is a reissue of what appears to be their entire Allied Recordings output, an hour and fifteen minutes of it. In the interest of archiving, it would have been awesome if they had included some lyrics, more photos, or hell, maybe even a fucking list of who played what, but if you sit down and listen to Buzzov-en, you probably won’t be doing a whole lot of reading.
–josh (Alternative Tentacles)