It’s ironic that I recently rewatched both Terminator movies this weekend (which hold up very well many years later) as I geared up to review this Arnold Schwarzenegger side project from As I Lay Dying’s Tim Lambesis. With Destroy The Runner’s Chad Ackerman providing the surprisingly good Arnie impersonations between songs and Tim Lambesis (along with a multitude of other guests like Jason Suecof and Adam D) providing all the instrumentation and writing, the end result is what you’d expect of a parody album side project involving a metalcore luminary and his pals.

With every song named after one liners from some of Arnold’s movies (namely The Terminator series, Predator, Batman & Robin, Last Action Hero, Total Recall, Kindergarten Cop, Eraser), the songs are all direct, short, fairly standard metalcore with a sterner thrash lean gruff shouts, and Lambesis even boasts that they all have breakdowns and solos, so musically don’t expect anything ground breaking, but it is pretty solid and with the Arnie gimmick, comes together quite well and with some mildly amusing and entertaining results. Lambesis even seems to poke a bit of fun at his full time band as well as the scene as a whole.

After the Governator’s intro, ADM jump right into “Get to the Chopper”, arguably the album’s highlight to get your attention right away, and as the subsequent tracks come and go, it becomes apparent that the tracks seem to mimic the quality of the movies that they are named from. “Rubber Baby Buggy Bumbers”, “Here is Subzero, Now Plain Zero”, “Who is Your Daddy and What Does he Do ” and “Its Not a Tumor” seem to pale next to the likes of “I Am a Cybernetic Organism”, “Come With Me if You want to Live”, “Screw You Benny!” and other standout, “If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It”. That being said though, this isn’t album of the year material as its pretty standard metalcore, and all of the tracks, even some of the in between song skits in involving Arnie (“What its Like to be a Singer at Band Practice”, “Why?”, “Brootal Song Idea”, “So Far, So Good, So Let’s Talk About It”, etc) are relatively disposable. Still though, it is a pretty fun album with Lambesis’s own production making all the tracks pretty stout, and a slight departure from As I Lay Dying. However, I have to wonder if Lambesis wasn’t in AILD and on Metal Blade if this project would have gotten to see the light of day.

My only gripe with the material is personal; What no Conan, Commando or True Lies related songs? And what about Arnie’s arguable cinematic epochs, Jingle all the Way and Junior fer chrissakes?

[Visit the band's website]

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