Caninus
Now The Animals Have A Voice

When approaching bizarre albums like this one, it's easy to find ourselves at a crossroads: should the original idea behind them lead us to consider them masterpieces, or should we instead see them as immense absurdities?

Caninus presents themselves as "The World's First Ever Animal-Fronted Band". In other words, it's a group of four musicians dedicated to traditional grindcore, of decent quality, which however replaces the much more common scream or growl vocals with the sounds of two pit bulls, typical of the genre.

This is precisely the point that places the reviewer at the crossroads mentioned at the beginning: on one hand, there is a certain admiration for the idea, undoubtedly original and, all things considered, well-motivated (they say on their Myspace profile that, while in most similar groups the singers try to simulate animalistic sounds, they decided to use real animals), on the other hand, many doubts arise regarding the actual artistic value of their musical proposal.

Let's first say that the music played by the four is, in its genre, quite pleasant, although not presenting great innovations: classic, simple grindcore with strong hardcore influences (after all, it seems that at least two musicians in the group are part of the line-up of Most Precious Blood) with rhythms mostly not excessively fast, unfortunately realized in the reviewed album through the use of an anonymous drum machine (one of the major flaws of the work), where there is room for rare melodic openings ("Brindle Brickheads", the dark opening of "Fear of Dog") and almost noise riffs ("Misunderstood Machines").
Something more could have perhaps been done in the production phase (at times the bass is almost imperceptible) but on the other hand, it is surprising how the dogs' sounds actually blend with the music, and it is likely in this regard that the most effort in the mixing phase was dedicated precisely to making the union between the music and the "vocals" (I don't know how else to define it) of the two pit bulls as natural and fluid as possible.

Even after this brief analysis, the initial doubt still persists, and perhaps the only solution to resolve it is to consider the album in question as a simple divertissement without great aspirations, in which case, keeping in mind that we are not at all faced with an essential work, the goal would have been fully achieved, thus deserving an ample overall passing grade.