Chicago's 7000 Dying Rats return after five years of silence with a new full length of their self-styled ""comedy grind"" heaviness, loaded with 28 tracks of grindcore/goofball skit/genre-fucking weirdness that's so full of in-jokes that I gave up trying to keep up, and just let their insane, Naked City-style approach sweep me along in a wave of weirdness. If the album cover depicting a bat-winged Indian god farting bats out of it's ass in Hell doesn't clue you in to the brilliance of Season In Hell, you'll get the picture by song three. When these guys play it heavy, it's crushing, like with the ridiculously Slayerized deathcore of second song ""Altar Of Goat Skulls"", which takes a sudden left turn into cheesy Nightmare On Elm Street style synthesizers and samples from some obscure occult horror movie. Or the plodding Frostian sludge of ""Bigfoot Destroy"". I noticed that the metal songs and sections have a similiar sludgy thrash sound as Lair Of The Minotaur, due in no small part to Lair guitarists Steve Rathbone and Donald James Barraca both playing in 7000 Dying Rats. Weasel Walter from Flying Luttenbachers plays drums as well, along with a constantly shifting lineup that reads like a who's who of the Chicago underground. And of course there are all of the goofy bits in between the heavier stuff, like tons of awesomely cheesy 80's style keyboard interludes, atonal violin scraping, terminally dumb white-boy hip-hop, the heartfelt ballad ""Your Studied Indifference is Duly Noted"", the glammy cock rocker ""Rock n Roll Weapon"" that coulda been an Eagles Of Death Metal b-side. 7000 Dying Rats also turn Sabbath's ""Paranoid"" into a tripped-out techno/bluegrass meltdown, and present us with ""Hellcatcher"", a retarded medley of satanic bass-noise and live recordings of drunken covers of Journey's ""Any Way You Want It"" and Judas Priest's ""Living After Midnight"". �Ballad of Chico� is a hilarious, epic space-prog freakout. And Scott Kelley from Neurosis appears on ""A Real Kneeslapper"", a weird ambient-drone track with Kelley telling a story that I'm still not getting. The whole album is confusing like that, blenderizing off-the-cuff silliness, metal parody, bits of stage and studio banter, and genuine grind/death devestation.