The Number 12 Looks Like You - Mongrel

The Best of 2007: Part Seven

I've been posting about a lot of metal/hardcore/noise albums lately, but I'll go back to posting about real music soon enough.

This is going to sound ridiculous, but I reall don't care. The Number 12 Looks Like You is easily one of the most brutal bands playing music. They were on a record label called Brutal Records, for God's sake. They're a bunch of weird dudes from Bergen County that worship really bad 80s metal, but somehow manage to come out on the other side of post-jazz-grind-screamo nonsense. If the dudes from the Dillinger Escape Plan weren't so elitist when it came to genres (and also hated Mike Patton), this would probably be what they sounded like.

As I mentioned before, finals make me a bit nervous, so I usually resort to listening to music that would make me feel a little bit shaky anyways. The riffs that the dudes in the Number 12 are playing jerk you around so much, it seems unnatural to people that actually listen to metal and grind full time. Mongrel is much heavier than previous Number 12 releases, however, it still manages to keep that Jersey charm; are suburban kids from Jersey inherently more violent and prone to grind than the rest of the country? I will never know.

If there's one song to definitely listen to on the album, it'd definitely be "Paper Weight Pigs." There's this classical gutiar bridge situated squarely in the middle of the song that's pretty mindblowing, besides the reggaeton/double-bass drum outro.

Mongrel