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Here’s a classic in the cult hardcore dept. Mental Abuse “Streets Of Filth” lp.There’s something about those NJHC lps from the early 80’s that the collector scum can’t get enough of. Mental Abuse are at least partially known because drummer Dave Jones also played in the Victim In Pain lineup of Agnostic Front. I believe there were also future members of AOD and at some point they had at least one of the Billys from the Psychos. But the prices their lp routinely fetches make them more than just a “members of” band.

Musically Streets of Filth a lot in common with AF’s United Blood phase, although it also reminds me a bit of Reagan Youth. Maybe halfway between the two. Stop-go-stop-go delivery and heavy bass driven mosh parts abound on this one while the production lives up to a name like Streets Of Filth with cheap fuzz and shaky at best precision drenching the guitars. The drums paddle and roll only the most basic patterns on each track and the lyrics are straight up juvenile, everything rhymes and the emotional depth is that of a 12 year old. That’s not any kind of disrespect on my part, it’s all part of the Mental Abuse charm. Adolescent Skins laments the rise of obnoxious young skinheads, Sock Woman tells some ridiculous story about a woman who wants to be a man, and No God is self explanatory. No sophistication or pretension, just bash your head against concrete, glue huffing, booze slopping, slime.

Streets of Filth was issued on Urinal Records in something like an edition of 500, although for how infrequently you’re liable to see it around I’d imagine a great many were destroyed or trashed. It’s also kind of hard to find with an unblemished cover, and I’d say the wear on this one is pretty normal. Considering it has never been repressed, and is unlikely to be in the near future (due to some member’s current ambivalence about the band), what matters most is that the vinyl is clean and playable.  All in all I’d say this is a good bet if you wanna drop 3 bills, and the seller has plenty of other tasty treats for you too.

I feel like I have to blog Articles of Faith “Give Thanks” on Thanksgiving day. I mean the relevance ends with the title of the record, but still I’m doing it, whatever.

Give Thanks is the first Articles of Faith lp, although it came to be four years after their inception. It’s a dense slab of wax, this was at the point when they’d started incorporating 3 guitar players into their live set (vocalist Vic Bondi doubling as axeman #3). It’s a fairly transitional release, and despite the fact it’s produced by Bob Mould, it does not go down easy.  The first song, the title track, opens with an ear splitting scream and jarring guitar riffs that shock you right into the chaos. It’s an anti-religion tirade, and it starts on your typical 84/Reagan era punk attack on middle-America and the value system that accompanies that. It’s kind of depressing and it can also be kind of over-wrought. But even when they lay it on thick (the redundant “5 o’clock” for instance) Articles of Faith don’t even touch the obnoxious moralizing they begat just a few years later.

Articles Of Faith were a big band in their day, but for me it’s somewhat dwarfed by the impact made by, by far their biggest imitator, a little band called Born Against. Unknown to Bondi and co, they basically laid the groundwork for the Nathanson/Mcpheters partnership that annoyed so many. Yes it’s not fair that I shit on Born Against in an Articles Of Faith write-up, or that I blame AOF for the travesty that is Born Against’s public persona. I even feel a little weird because I actually like both of the bands. What I’m trying to point out I think, is that the Born Against sound originates PRIMARILY here, on this album. The dead serious politics, the sombre melodies, the dramatic and impassioned delivery — all of this was copied, albeit without the precise musicianship seen here. Everyone can please save it  by pointing out shit like “Well Fed Fuck” being a copy of Godflesh’s “Dream Long Dead”.

Anyway, now that I’ve got all that out… I think this is sort of the beginning of the end for Articles of Faith, at least for me. While I do like all their material, this shit is just so heavy handed, and they throw a really dated sounding proto-emo track in the middle called “Every Man For Himself”, complete with piano and introspective lyrics. The band still fire all cylinders on most of the tracks, In Your Suit and American Dreams are still powerful discordant hardcore, but they also don’t reach the heights of earlier songs like Buy This War or What We Want Is Free. It is somewhat interesting to hear them trying to break out of the confines of what was normal hardcore for the time. Working on slower sections, using feedback and unsettling interplay between the guitars to convey mood. It’s an effective white guilt statement by children of relative privilege, but it’s also hard to swallow for me personally at this point in time. I’d rather jam their 7″s & early comp tracks.

For the record this is not the original pressing, which is on Reflex records and has a red cover. This is ‘92 Bitzcore reissue which contains two bonus tracks tacked on the end, although at this point, this version isn’t exactly easy to come by either.

…and now back to this Twin Peaks marathon. Enjoy your leftovers.

Unity “You Are One” is maybe the first record you could call 2nd-wave Straight Edge. It’s pretty close with the first Youth Of Today E.P. so I’m not entirely sure, but Unity was at least a band before Youth of Today. Unfortunately their original singer died shortly before their 7″ recording and Pat Dubar who was already fronting Uniform Choice was asked to step in for the recording. UC had already produced a demo by that time, but their lp came out after the Unity 7″ which gives things a confusing chronology. It’s kind of weird the band would opt to replace a member like that but I guess you have to remember they were young and just trying to do the right thing. I have no idea how they managed to play such positive music in the wake of that sort of thing, but this record is right up there with 7 seconds in terms of upbeat hopefulness. By the way, aside from Pat Dubar, the record also features other Orange County hardcore staples like Pat Longrie (also of Uniform Choice, and co-founder of the Wishingwell label), and Joe Foster (of Ignite, and I think briefly No For An Answer).

You Are One opens up and shows you everything pretty much in the first 10 seconds - it’s a snappy mix of Minor Threat and 7 Seconds with tuneful guitar riffs and quick snare rolls, colored by lyrics about being young, straight edge, and well basically just those two things. The opening track is Straight On View, have a taste of the lyrics (going from memory here so I apologize if I fuck it up):

Don’t need it/I never will/ That kind of pressure I don’t feel. Don’t want it/ I’m free/ artificial happiness is not for me!

When you’re 17 is there anything that makes you feel better than this? If you’re anything like me (and you’re probably not), then the answer is “no not really”. But this shit’s great. This is how straight edge hardcore is done. The crew backups on the chorus yelling “Straight On View!” it’s a good feeling. Maybe it’s a little bit over the top that the next song is called Positive Mental Attitude, but they really thrash it out pretty fast and that makes it feel a lot better. Just that teenaged anger fit to burst right out of your chest that you want to turn into something good - you can feel it coming right through the speakers.

The next couple cuts have the same kind of perfection in their delivery, but there is kind of a bogus misstep in the song “Love”. Semi-high school poetry about well, you know. It’s also kind of slow, and just all in all goes nowhere. I always skip this track it just stinks. It’s back to the fast and good with “You Are One” after that, and just when you feel like things won’t get bad again, they slap you with some STRAIGHT UP high school poetry. Yes a spoken poem every bit as juvenile as the title, “To Risk” would lead you to assume it is. Who gave this the okay? Absolutely UNBEARABLE. However it’s easy to skip since it’s at the end, and as such, leaves this record’s legacy, largely untarnished.

Note to all of hardcore (for future reference).

• Crucifix - “From Dehumanization…” (Annihilation) spoken intro = good part.
• Unity - “To Risk” spoken outro = bad part.

This is the rare, original Wishingwell pressing FYI. I think there’s only 1,000, with a small amount on blue vinyl. If you just need to own the tunes, Indecision did a repress of this in ‘99 (holy shit that’s so long ago) that’s still easy to come by. Dave Mandel, if you’re reading this, I (and about 10 other people on earth) are still waiting for Pushed Aside on cd (with the comp track).  If it helps, I’ll buy 3 (one for the house, one for the car, one for safe keeping).

Nihilist - Radiation Sickness, Drowned

Fuck. It is Monday again and I can’t pretend I haven’t been slackin’ on ye olde blog entries lately. So I’m gonna dive right into it here on thanksgiving week. Both of the Nihilist singles are on ebay right now and if you don’t have ‘em now, you might as well give it a shot. Both are kind of sketchy origin-wise. I think one is an official bootleg type deal, and the other was pressed in a small run by the actual band but both are culled from their legendary and trendsetting late 80’s demos.

Of course a good number of the songs from those demos ended up on Entombed’s debut lp “Left Hand Path”, which you probably already know is considered by most to be the most notable Swedish Death Metal lp. But before the band could kick out Johnny Hedlund, sign a contract to Earache, and change their name to Entombed, they made some great demo recordings, originally sounding kind of like a de-tuned Kreator, but eventually laying down all the blueprints that hundreds of subsequent bands would follow. The sound of the buzzing HM-1 pedal (now replaced by the well known Metal Zone pedal), the gurgling and guttural growls about gore and death, and a crushing mix of power riffs and unabashedly masturbatory swirls of guitar chaos and dissonance. What it really proves is that kids used to be a lot more creative -  Nihilist was a high school band. The influences they fused together, 80’s Deathrash, early grind, and Swedish hardcore, influenced a significant portion of an entire genre…

Both the Drowned and Radiation Sickness singles come from the same session although only the songs on the Drowned single were released on tape at the time, and with the exception of the cover of Repulsion’s Radiation Sickness, which seems thrown in for fun, they both work well to show where these boys would go next. 

So we did Thanksgiving yesterday at my job, and it resulted in the entire building taking a 2 hour lunch, followed by overstuffed lethargy that carried over into most of today. Therefore I didn’t actually get around to posting yesterday, I only had the necessary brain power to do my actual job, not this one too. But here we are, a day later, and everything is fine.

So why not go with an easy one?

Gauze - Equalizing Distort is a sure bet if you like fast hardcore. I mean maybe there’s still a few people out there who wanna get all weird about listening to good music from not-America, but we don’t bug out about that around here, we just assume they were in Rain On The Parade or some such shit.

Anyway, for some people Equalizing Distort is THE Gauze album. I don’t think you can really declare one better than the rest with a band like this. They’ve existed for almost 30 years and played extremely uncompromising hardcore for the entire time, though they’ve only had 5 proper albums, and a few compilation appearances. But one thing that has to be noted is this is really the proper beginning of the Gauze sound. The starting point here is Discharge, and on early recordings they were truer to that style, but there’s a huge emphasis on a kind of herk and jerk starting and stopping that frankly the boys from Stoke-on-Trent wouldn’t have been able to manage in their heyday. This kind of rapidfire on-off-on-off-on approach to seemingly simple hardcore riffs serves, quite well to disorient the listener and really get your head spinning. People frequently site this fact about Gauze that they are trying to sound fast without actually playing at a high number of beats per minute. To give replicate the feeling of speed and movement. It’s interesting because, after music gets to a certain speed, like say in grindcore, the relentless pounding becomes almost static and unmoving again. So rather than just blast it out, Gauze keeps things at a decent mid-paced to moderately fast clip but with a constant shifting of the gears.  It’s something hard to put into words, but when you hear the pounding churn of opener and all time classic, Pressing On it just sort of crystallizes. The riffs ascend and descend back and forth while the drums are constantly rolling from snare to toms and back again. It’s a constant feeling of disharmony and chaos. With each recording subsequent to this, Gauze increased this tension in their music, building on top of everything they’d done the time before, but this is for all intents, the starting point.

There’s nothing like a test press of a classic record to pique your interest reader. So I submit, Rorschach’s - Remain Sedate on Vermiform records, in test press form. Probably best remembered as the first significant musical statement by one of the most historically important bands of the 90s. I’d say for better or worse, (and I’m afraid it’s quite obviously for worse), there are only a few bands that had more of an impact on the subsequent musical landscape insofar as rock and roll. But though Remain Sedate is a classic, it’s probably not had half the impact of Rorschach’s later, Protestant lp. Instead it treads a weird territory between Die Kreuzen’s 1st lp, COC’s Animosity, with a bit of an early Swans under current, and, unfortunately, a bit of the unpleasant early 90’s basement aftertaste. It’s formative and imperfect, but still pretty great, at least as far as music that makes you feel bad can be (and we all know it can be).

For the time though, 1990, this stuff is pretty ripping, and still very harsh, even when it feels a little dated. The ear splitting bellows of Charles Maggio are enough to stick with you long after the needle is skipping along the runoff groove, and the slippery guitar charge led by Keith Huckins manages to enclose the listener into some kind of nightmare haze. It’s hard listening honestly. The jams are dense, the mood is not uplifting, and the taste is bitter. But it’s important even if, and maybe because, it makes you feel like shit. The originality it was ripe with is still evident even after all this time, and so, it’s not surprising that a substantial part of any dollar bin now is crammed with inferior derivatives of that original sound. How tacky.

Unleashed - Where No Life Dwells 

The most juvenile way to fire someone from a band is to decide to break up the band, and then reform it a few days later with all but the member you wanted to kick out. This is the way it was done when I was in high school, and my friends were hardly the inventors of such a practice, as this was the fate that befell a young and chubby faced Johnny Hedlund (at the time of the band Nihilist, one of Sweden’s formative death metal bands). When they broke up and then reformed as Entombed a week later, it was a bit of a slap in the face to John, but he’s done quite well for himself since then, and at least maintained an image and track record a bit more respectable than his former band mates (other than being accused of the usual facist sympathies that most metal lifers are).

Unleashed became the new moniker under which Hedlund operated and after a couple of demo and 7″ releases, a contract to Century Media was signed, and Where No Life Dwells was subsequently recorded and issued. Hedlund hereby marked himself as one of the most vicious death grunters in the business (that being the business of death metal), kicking off the beginning of the violent Dead Forever with an unearthly growl. The rest of the song lives up to that initial bark, forgoing the technical flim-flam that Entombed was already sinking into, in favor of just cracking your skull open. Unleashed, keep it dark, murky, and brutal, without any of the guitar-center showmanship that many other bands of the day found themselves stinking of. When the mosh part of Dead Forever happens (one of the greatest death metal moments ever I might add), its’ simplicity is stunning. It’s as direct and unhindered as these sort of things can be. All crush on your ears and your spirits. Dense and hopeless, shit-feeling.

The rest of the album essentially follows the template the opener has set forth. C-tuned chugging and rumbling, simple tremolo combinations on the frets, and hoarse, unearthly gurgling vocals. The directness and brutality remain too, with most songs running under 4 minutes, and none breaking 5. While that may not be too weird to an outsider, it’s kind of unusual for a death metal album. The whole thing seems to be designed to be listenable and rewarding, with each song using just the riffs it needs to get to you, and only using them as much as they’re needed. This sort of economical construction is rare in this genre, and as such, more appreciated by me. The sound of the album keeps the guitars free of bumble-bee buzzing excess, and typewriter derived bass drum clicking, which helps to emphasize the songs themselves and bring the listener more of the cold, painful satisfaction that death metal exists for. If you’re slow on the come up, this is one of the best.

Here’s another bumout - No Trend’s “Teen Love” 7″.

These guys were the DC answer to Flipper, dirging, repetitive, annoying, obnoxious, and at odds with most of the DC in-crowd. The guitar often just made horrible ear splitting noise, while the bass and drums rattled along, and the vocals spat each line, snarling against a hopelessly lost consumer culture.

The title track is an endless 6 minute track that’s a little dated now, but still gets the job done. Most of it focuses on a banal relationship between a young teen boyfriend and girlfriend, the punchline being their violent death in a car accident. The music plays like busted British post punk (early cure/joy div) as the guitar breaks up from time to time. It’s a shock tactic and not very subtle to kill the song’s characters in the end, but considering it was the 80’s (when a few things were still shocking) I can be a little more forgiving.

On the other side, Cancer pulses along with a happy-go-lucky bass line but forced up against buzzing screeching guitar, and snarled vocals that actually remind me a lot of Antidote. Of course, unlike Antidote, there’s no pay-off with bands like this, you just get dragged down into the muck, or if you’re already down there, you slosh about in it, and lament your first world problems. I think it’s an okay song, but again this shit tends to be on the dated side. When Flipper is good, they’re really good, but when they’re bad they’re the worst (I mean bad bad, not good bad). As such any band descended from their sound has to answer for its short comings, and the aspects that date it, and while Cancer and Teen Love aren’t too bad, they’re really of the time and nothing great.

The real gem here is the 3rd track, Mass Sterilization Caused By Venereal Disease. I guess you could say this is the hardcore song on the record, but it plays like a No Wave-ish answer to that sound. The guitar lays down a tv-static chainsaw crush of fuzz, while the bass plucks away and the drums bash and crash cave man style, everything on an endless loop essentially. The vocals only growl the song title over and over, and then punctuate it with a bizarre cackle again and again (though I’m quite sure it’s not a loop). It’s sort of the ultimate post ironic reduction of the original Discharge template. One indecipherable guitar note buzzing against the bass, one simple drum smash, one line of lyrics. No really, I think this song exceeds the brilliance of most other No Trend material, and it’s a personal favorite of the time and era.

btw - this copy is rather overpriced

Obituary - Slowly We Rot O.G. on Roadracer (1989) 

I think there’s a valid argument in saying that Obituary were/are the standard bearer for Florida Death Metal in the 90s, and maybe the band that’s stayed truest to their roots of the old guard. They weren’t tech’d out like Morbid Angel (or Death), they weren’t Satanic like Deicide, and they weren’t as “shocking” as Cannibal Corpse, but I kind of will always view Obituary as the death metal band of the people. They were young as hell, and though they had missteps through the years, never really got distracted from their original goal of just ripping off early Celtic Frost and Death, nor did they ever sacrifice power riffs and insane vocals for artistic direction or cred. I think really the only band of the original big death metal groups to have a better trajectory might be Bolt Thrower, who actually aren’t all that different from the classic Obituary sound. Sort of the Death Metal AC/DC in some ways.

What really makes Obituary stand out is the growled and snarled vokills of the legendary John Tardy. Sometimes he’s not even singing actual words on Slowly We Rot, just growling and grinding his throat. Certain people are put on earth to do one thing, and I think there’s not much doubt that this is what John Tardy was meant to do. The riffs are relatively simple for a Death Metal album — there’s minimal tremolo type strumming and  simple, brief solos. The band chooses to focus on groove and atmosphere, with tight oppressive, and generally midpaced stuff that kind of works like a more over the top Hellhammer.

Surprising to some is the fact that most of the album was recorded on a reel to reel 8track by Scott Burns. I guess this is what it takes for him to not muck up a band’s songs because for the most part it sounds much better than the majority of the productions he engineered later on, even though his work on this album was a benchmark for the style. Almost as surprising is that the band is actually in standard tuning on this. It still manages to sound incredibly thick and deep. There’s really not many albums that bludgeon on such a primitive level so effectively, but Slowly We Rot has stood the test of time as a genre classic, and is far less dated sounding now, than most of Obituary’s contemporaries debuts.