White Mice – Ganjahovahdose (2009)

For a person that has never done drugs, I have a hard time imagining what would it feel to be on crack or on an acid trip, but now thanks to White Mice I have both a visual and an aural experience of what I think it would come close to it.

“Ganjahovahdose” is the band’s sixth full length album and it’s a very very very weird one. This Rhode Island outfit has been terrorizing the masses since 2001 and I assume they have gotten weirder and weirder in every release.

The band’s style is very hard to describe since they mix all kinds of genres and stuff together, but if I had to call it something I would say it’s close to Noisegrind with some Sludge Metal here and there. This album features a wide assortment of deranged samples utilized in the songs to create an even more bizarre sound than the one the band accomplishes with their distorted guitars and screams.

I must say that in order to fully understand the band you really need to see the booklet art and read all their demented lyrics, then it makes sense how they create a very dense cloud of distortion, somewhat random drumming (sounds like it), bass chords and a layer of noises and vocals.

Even in their promo picture, the band members are wearing lab coats, mouse masks and they are standing in front of a mouse infused pentagram, if this is not WTF material then I don’t know what you will find strange in this planet. The whole image works very well for the band as an extra dimension to their unconventional musical compositions. I can’t stop wondering if they can ever play the same song the same way twice. I should probably make it to one of their live shows to see what they do with this music.

After reading all this, it’s pretty much your call if you want to experience something completely bizarre and different. If you do, get the original CD since one third of the “Ganjahovahdose” experience is plastered in the artwork. I can’t really say that this band is terrible and they suck, because they are indeed original and their ‘music’ creates a very thick atmosphere, one that makes you feel trapped in somebody else’s drug induced trip. So to be fully objective I have to say that White Mice are indeed something that every OPEN MINDED metalhead probably has to experience at least once in their lives.

Release: October 2009

Country: USA