Lafcadio describe themselves as "experi-metal" -- explained as being "powerfully regulated, densely organized wall-of-sound style metal and delirious, spasming, often sublime experimentation" -- but when I listen to Kibosh, what I hear is mathcore. Mind you, those aren't mutually exclusive ideas; the various takes on mathy hardcore exemplified by Ipecac's roster have always shared some innate sympathies with the proggier wing of the death-metal institution. Still, Lafcadio approach this stuff like guys who've only just discovered riffs. Screaming over tumult comes more naturally than do metal's martial intricacies.
Okay, for the sake of fairness: there are some flecks of gold scattered throughout the record. "NotATeeFrontNorFeetATon" begins with a neat subversion of a stock heavy metal intro -- the palm-muted tremolo riff -- and, over the course of its two-and-a-half minutes, works through a thrashy progression that sounds both clever and premeditated. And while "The Kibosh Occasion" begins on a dull note, it develops into a series of stomping passages that eventually includes both a very brief chorus and some credible guitar soloing. Kibosh includes some other satisfying stuff, but, those two moments aside, the rest is tough panning.
The majority of Kibosh sounds like Ipecac-as-indie-rock -- about what you'd expect from the album art (a wittily sarcastic take on '70s fashion magazines), the whiteboard Mcluskyisms that make up the song titles, and the one-sheet's assurances that Kibosh represents a wild, avant-garde kind of heavy metal. Indeed, "truer" metal has rarely been this overtly clever, and it's unfortunate that it constitutes almost a giveaway of the band's real orientation.
"On the whole," declares the one-sheet, "this album has all the hallmarks of a gold-standard, discourse-shifting, classic metal album -- minus the singles, minus the formulas (except when they're exploited to achieve something interesting), minus the bullshit, minus the boredom." One wonders what bullshit in particular the author of that sentence was bored with -- gold-standard, classic metal albums, perhaps. Hey, nobody can deny that there's plenty of boring, derivative shit in the metal world, or that striking out for originality is to be commended, but Kibosh doesn't feel so much like a shift in discourse as a discursive irrelevancy. Its strongest recommendation is to fans of post-hardcore, not the metalheads Lafcadio aspire to command.