GUEST POST: Sean “ORC Adams” of ORCumentary -Top Albums of the Year 2020


 

Ghost Cult continues our “End of Year Guest Post Extravaganza” with a slew of posts from bands, industry, PR pros, and more! We’ll be sharing lists, memories, and other shenanigans from our favorite bands, partners, music industry peers, and other folks we respect across the globe. Today’s post brings released an “ORChestrated” version of his classic track “Goblin Death March” as a lyric video. The track is from his upcoming album “Fully ORChestrated” which remakes many of his classic tracks.

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ORCumentary – Destroy The Dwarves


orcumentary-destroy-the-dwarves

If there’s a question more thorny in the world of Metal than the purpose of live albums, it is surely, what is the point of comedy bands? The line can sometimes be hard to draw in a genre where even our revered classics border on self-parody, but there is a palpable difference between the essential silliness of the style and a band built around a joke, and there’s something hard-to-swallow – something almost “un-Metal”, as elitist as that might sound – about the latter.

The first thing you notice about ORCumentary is the guitar sound – it sounds like a collection of roughed-up, distorted midi-files strung together into riffs. Then you realise that that’s exactly what it is. Destroy The Dwarves (Orc Rock) is entirely the work of sole-member Orc Adams, who has created all of the music on his keyboards and added vocals over the top. Once you realise what’s going on it’s actually quite impressive, and sounds better than you might expect – honestly, I’ve heard Black Metal bands that sound less like real guitars – but once the shock of the unusual has worn off the music has to be judged alongside other folk-tinged Black Metal, and, even in the frequently shoddy genre, it doesn’t do well. There are some effectively catchy riffs, and the keyboard melodies are often as sharp as you’d expect from a keyboardist’s band, but its assembled crudely and often hangs together unconvincingly, riffs mashing into parpy sections with little real sense of why. The closest comparison is probably someone like Nekrogoblikon or old Finntroll, but ORCumentary are firmly the bargain-basement version.

It might be easier to overlook some of Orcumentary’s musical shortcomings if they were actually funny, but once again their efforts in this direction miss the mark. Humour is, of course, a very subjective thing, and I’m sure there’ll be people laughing out loud at Destroy The Dwarves’ squeaky dwarf voices and chants of “You! Must! Procreate!”, but they left me cold. It also doesn’t help that this is clearly played for laughs; front-loading the humour and practically screaming “this is funny!” after every song – compare with the recent album by Gloryhammer, which delivers lines of total over-the-top silliness with an utterly straight face, and succeeds in being considerably funnier as a result. Destroy The Dwarves in comparison feels more like a drunk student joke, and not a great one.

It’s difficult to seriously criticise Destroy The Dwarves, for the simple reason that all of its flaws are so clearly deliberate, and it can’t be denied that putting together an album of this nature by yourself with nothing but midi-synths IS impressive, but when held up alongside other albums it’s just not enough. Shit on purpose is still shit, and a smart trick is worth less than a regular band if it can’t deliver the goods. Perhaps worth listening to once just for the novelty, but I’d honestly be surprised if many people even finished the album, let alone came back for more.

 

3.0/10

RICHIE HR


Full Album Stream: ORCumentary – Destroy the Dwarves


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Straight from the barren wastes of the savage Orc Lands (a.k.a Connecticut) comes ORCumentary! Armed for battle and riding for glory with their new album, Destroy the Dwarves, Ghost Cult is proud to premiere the full album stream for at this link or below:

 

Led by keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter Orc Adams, Orcumentary plays self-styled blackened comedic industrial/power/folk/melodic death metal. Another way to put it is they kick ass and have fun doing it! Adams has commented on Destroy the Dwarves which drops tomorrow, October 2nd:

“The album Destroy the Dwarves continues where “Orcs 1 Goblins 0” left off. Now that the Goblins are utterly obliterated, Orc Adams, hero of the orcs and wielder of the Keyboard of Mayhem, sets his sights on the Dwarves. Their king reaches out to him to sue for peace, as they don’t want to meet the same fate as the goblins. “Into Their Cavernous Hole We Plunge” is one of the middle chapters, where Orc Adams and six of his best soldiers first arrive at the entrance to the Dwarven mine. It’s an upbeat and straightforward song with great keyboard parts (like most ORC songs) that covers a lot of musical ground in just under 4 minutes. The final version of the song has a few surprises if the listener is already familiar with the demo (included in the “You Must Procreate!” EP).”

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ORCumentary merch and pre-order