### Laetitia In Holocaust: The tortoise boat

#### 04/06/09 || GardensTale

I recently stated in a review that it’s becoming increasingly hard to be original. So I generally applaud it when bands attempt to be original. However! Smacking your steel-plated face into piles of scrap metal rhythmically is original too. Yet it sounds like crap. Turns out that WHOA! You need fucking talent to be original and good. What do you know.

Enter Laetitia in Holocaust, taking the prize for weirdest band title, weirdest album title and with “Hair is the salt of Carthago” weirdest song title too. Originality abounds on this disc. Describing the sound is quite difficult. Think black metal, but instead of tremolo picked guitar riffs we get a weird reverbing bass sound and piss poor black metal screams. The drums, the bass and the vocals are all out of sync. I hope as fuck that this is intentional, because otherwise both musicians are either deaf or can not for the life of them keep a rhythm.

And we keep listening and the band just muddles on, throwing some weird shit in here and there. “Oh hey, let’s make this song really odd and slow and add whispers and people talking” (“Hissing through the veins of gods”) but after about 10 minutes, no one gives a crap anymore. It sounds like shit. And it may be shit that’s so original it looks like a purple glittering elephant but when you step in it, it still sticks and stinks. The production is very KVLT (meaning it sucks) and I’m sure the band members consider themselves very KVLT as well and take me for a sell-out mainstream corporate puppet, but let’s face the facts: the music on this disc sucks and I don’t intend to waste more time on it than necessary.

And so LiH have become a school example of why originality isn’t enough. The only way to save this junk is if the band members find a fucking metronome, get a sense of rhythm implanted surgically, rethink the production, hire a new singer, then throw away the whole project and study the brewing of whiskey instead because musically this is worth less than a rat’s ass. Nice shot, fellas, now get out of that basement and get some sun, cause evidently you can’t play in the dark.

3 muddled basses out of 10.

- Information
- Released: 2009
- Label: Self-released
- Website: Laetitia In Holocaust MySpace
- Band
- S.: vocals, guitars, bass, keyboards, programming
- N.: bass, guitars

- Tracklist
- 01. Hair is the salt of Carthago
- 02. Descent
- 03. The gift of fury
- 04. Hissing through the veins of the gods
- 05. A gesture before you enter the darkness
- 06. Immanence and illumination