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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.