The band and album titles here probably approximate whatever people mean when they say "doom metal" (which really just refers to the speed, i.e. slow), but the better term's (cause it's the idea one, not just a speedometer reading) "self hate." In high school you wrote in your yearbook, quoting Beckett: "Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." But you were trying to improve. Put that up against Facedowninshit's interpretation-- Nothing Positive, Only Negative-- and tell me what high school was really like for you. Or college, or your twenties, or however you feel when you're thrashed, doomed, pigfucked, or powerviolent. Are you gonna fail better, or fail better, like real bad?
When Facedowninshit started in 1999 it was as provocation, uncompromising dudes from North Carolina who hung with the USAISAMONSTER crew and wrecked basements at a blur: seven years hard time have slowed them to a crawl, and landed them on Relapse, even though they're literally one of the last bands on earth a reasonable person could expect to get signed.
In other words, don't exactly believe NPON's titular sentiment. Listen to "Countless": Even as Jason Crumer swears up and down about "No chance for freedom/ No chance for hope/ No chance for countless futureless children/ With no hope", his guitar's a traitor, flashing blues via thrash via metal via slower metal licks, unable to quite get to that dark place where there will, in fact, be no more riffs (a Kelly Polar show, for instance). "Ten Strip"'s just too fast: lyrics scream, "I'm a fucking acid casualty," which is exactly what their scattershot and well-armed doom feels like; PCP over weed, 15-minute sets over depressive jags that stretch for hours. Left For Dead pulled a similar trick circa a decade ago, menacing and bellowing over their own predicament-- then too it was always somebody else's fault-- but not in a shut-in way either; kids could skate to it, and did. Actually come to think of, Left For Dead's slogan was "EAT SHIT", so maybe they weren't just predecessors but prophets, too.
Facedowninshit's "Fucked" works out why their misery never quite becomes a downer: "The guitar's my only friend/ Hack the chord and everything disappears/ Hack the chord until everything disappears," which sounds that violent, but really's that redemptive. They come pretty close to a guitar solo on this song, so you know dudes mean it.
More evidence for life-is-misery but music-is-fun might be the bassist's name: Waylon Riffs. But the case shouldn't be overstated: As they say, on "NPON", "Self hatred/ Self medicate/ Self destruction/ Nothing positive/ Only negative," and they mean that, too: Self-hatred gets a lot of people out of bed in the morning.
