Metalocalypse CD/DVD review

Adult Swim has unleashed a CD of music by animated extreme metal band, Dethklok, entitled Dethalbum. The release features several full-length songs from the Metalocalypse series plus a few brand new ones. A deluxe CD edition of Dethalbum has also been released. The deluxe edition includes a second disc featuring seven more tracks, the animated video for the single “Bloodrocuted,” and the premiere episode from Season 2 of Metalocalypse.

Creator or Metalocalypse, Brendon Small (Home Movies) got together with famous metal drummer Gene Hoglan to record full-length tracks spawned from the minute or so clips that were on the show to create Dethalbum. For the album, Small played both lead and rhythm guitar, bass, and “growls” as the voice of Dethklok’s lead singer Nathan Explosion, while Hoglan provided the drum tracks for the album.

The album debuted at #21 on the Billboard 200 chart, and dominated the Loud Rock Radio charts, hitting #6 on CMJ, #11 on FMQB, and #1 on Mediaguide Metal Specialty. This makes Metalocalypse: Dethklok’s “The Dethalbum” the highest charting death metal album to date. With 33,740 copies sold in its first week, The Dethalbum was also streamed 45,000 times when it went live on AOL Music during the week of its release. It has so far sold over 100,000 copies.

Fans of Decide, Slayer, and Meshuggah (to name a few) would be remiss in failing to incorporate The Dethalbum into their metal album collection. The Dethalbum is ferociously powerful, with unabashed brutally unleashed in every song.

Dethklok’s fans are diehard, keeping in line with the Metalocalypse sense of humor; one fan hails: “if you took the Sun, and gave all of its power to a whale, which you then gave armor made from asteroids collected from the deepest reaches of black space and a staff which could alter the curvature of space time itself, and then took that whale, put it in a blender, dried the whale puree, and formed the powder into a pill which you then gave to a grizzly bear, the amount of power that bear now has is how much I love Dethklok.”

Brendon Small, creator of Metalocalypse, joked about the success of Dethklok’s Dethalbum: “It feels great to finally be recognized as the serious cartoon musician that I know that I am. I feel vindicated to have surpassed the sales of ‘Jem and the Holograms’ and ‘The Archies’. You have no idea how many cartoon groupies this will get me.”

The Metalocalypse two disc DVD box set has been released with the entirety of Season 1, and the deluxe special edition, adding in seven episodes from season two, including “Duncan Hills Coffee Jingle.”

In this episode, the band does a concert up in Batsfjord, Norway and does only one song, a jingle for the Duncan Hills Coffee company. They are there to make coffee “metal,” blacker than the blackest-black times infinity! Metalocalypse is known for random deaths in each episode. This episode makes no exception, burning off fan’s faces with the hot coffee raining upon them.

The series is addictive, filled with non-stop wit, while leaving the audience awestruck.

By Roya Butler