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I guess the main attractions here are exclusive tracks by Bastard and Cruck, but there’s also Mad Conflux, Bad Smells, Pile Driver. I wish more bands did little tour only samplers like this. Only like… not bogus amazing core bands that need another product for their package tour. Just cool bands that I like that need another product for their cool package tour of raging music. Good poorly drawn skull-beast art here. Not too much to say so just take it all in.

Dude another Seraphic Decay post? YES. (I hope I haven’t done this one before. I don’t really trust the search.) One of the finest and most desirable SD releases Mortician - Brutally Mutilated 7″. This is as low brow as music can get. There’s no way you can explain this to your parents, your girlfriend, your co-workers. You are a fucking freak if you dig this pile of excrement. The cones on your speakers will actually start to emanate the smell of wet garbage. Believe me, I know; I own this classic slab.

Listening to brutal death metal, grindcore, and other such harsh musics is what I think being a drug addict is like. I’ve never been a drug addict but I’ve heard about that shit. The first time it’s disorienting but something brings you back for a second fix, and then a third, and then you’ve got a taste for the foul stuff. Pretty soon the only people you talk to are other crackheads about the last hit you had: “dude the Traumatic - “The Process of Raping a Rancid Cadaver” demo…” (yes this is a real demo). In a word this is the most degraded catagory of music available on earth. Absolutely the lowest. However, there is something to be said for such a thing.

The incredible paradox of most death metal bands is that they are absolutely the most micro niche-specific music ever, but unlike say, “Noise”, “Lofi Black Metal”, “Hardcore”, etc. they generally require hours of practice and high levels of skill to perform. In that way I expect the late John Peel, was right in comparing the early offerings of bands like Carcass to “Free Jazz”. As they say, Jazz is made for other Jazz musicians, in that way it’s kind of vulgar and excessive, and a record like Mortician’s “Brutally Mutilated” is much the same. Virtually no one outside of genre followers can appreciate what’s on display on this record. A side note here, the level of skill is actually fairly low for a death metal record, which maybe actually insulates it more from the understanding of outsiders. At least on some level even the most uninitiated have to admit that “Left Hand Path”has skillful performances, whether they can appreciate the sound or not. The skill level on Brutally Mutilated though, probably gets up to a 4 on a scale of 1-10. Sloppy performances, simple riffs, and the band is never all that in sync. To me this makes for a better listen. It’s the difference between a CGI monster and a make-up and corn syrup job in a horror movie.

Speaking of horror movies - that’s basically as deep as it gets with Mortician. The alpha and omega of their influences. If the song titles “Mortician” and “Brutally Mutilated” didn’t flesh that out enough for you, just refer to “Necro Cannibal”. For early death metal and grind this is a pretty great single. The vocals aren’t so deep that they lose the flavor, the drums actually sound great (big boomy bass drum, very uncommon for this style), the guitars are nice and thick and not too treble-ful. A genre classic to be sure. Oh for those in the know, this is actually when the band still recorded w/ a live drummer (Matt Sicher R.I.P.).

Like I said before this is one of the more desirable Seraphic Decay items, though it comes up frequently, this was one of the bands that actually “made it” (you know… in the scene), so a lot of people want it. I’ve seen a lot on blue vinyl, some with different color covers (mine is tan). I know there’s black vinyl too. 

ps. This post shoulda gone up yesterday sorrrrry.

The Alleycats “Nothing Means Nothing Anymore” b/w “Give Me a Little Pain”is a huge personal favorite in the early US punk/KBD/proto-HC category. Even though it’s considered to be one of the 2nd teir Dangerhouse releases, I’d actually take the song on the A-Side over most other tracks that were released on the label (exceptions being maybe “Solitary Confinement” and “Let’s Get Rid Of NY”). I’ve always loved this obnoxious little riff that has a little ascending bunch of notes that then flip around and come back down. It’s tense but still pretty rockin. The guitar drops out in time for the verse so that main man Randy Stodola can be the focus of the action, while Dianne Chai (a great bassist and a good singer too), and drummer John McCarthy hold the track together. By the way McCarthy is a pro too. In fact in the now classic BreakMyFace.com internet round up of the Dangerhouse label, it’s noted that the band was exceedingly efficient during the recording session, basically just ripping right through the tracks on tape. Stodola stretches and slurs his words like any good punk singer would in ‘78 and builds tension before the songs big rock n roll chorus thats slathered in “whoas”. Stick a good bar rock solo in there in place for the 3rd verse and you’ve got a winner in my book. There’s nothing out of the ordinary for Nothing Means Nothing, it’s by the book, they just happen to nail it.

The flip side is Give Me a Little Pain, which might have actually been a better A-side because it’s a little poppier and thus more catchy. It’s also got some backup singing presumably by Chai, which leaves it kind of sounding like a de-Rockabilly’d X, which is totally awesome in my estimation. If there’s one thing that I get weary of when listening to X it’s John Doe and Billy Zoom’s fucking hotrod slick hair sky blue Cadillac bullshit. But that’s a different post for a different day (and BTW I sitll like X a lot). Sorry to digress.

There’s 2 different sleeve variations of this single, the more common is a live photo with a fold over cover, but this version has a shot of the band hanging out backstage and comes with a 7×7″ square cover.

Charles Bronson - Youth Attack 12″ w/ metal cover

With hindsight I guess it’s kind of easy to shit on Charles Bronson’s “legacy” but I for one find it to be unfair. Sure there were plenty of people into the novelty aspect of the band (the name, the song titles, the samples, and for a lot of posers the song lengths), but start to finish I find that their output holds up quite well. Maybe it’s because this was one of the first really fast type bands I checked out as a teen but I dunno, all the splits are still raging obnoxious blurred speed-HC, the demo and first 7″ are pretty awesome sub-Neos teen scuzz, and their lp, Youth Attack, is IMO the best of this wave of thrashy pv bands (not counting Despise You, who are more like a grind band trying to imitate HC anyway).

I remember around the time I got into hardcore music was when the Charles Bronson lp actually had come out and I remember that it was impossible to find if you were clueless beb. Soon after I found out about the version with the metal sleeve being auctioned here. A few years later the band put video of themselves shooting a hole through one with a shotgun as bonus in their discography. There’s supposed to be 333 of these, but some people say there’s only 100. Whichever is the correct number is irrelevant, it’s a desirable collectible.

Anyway, like I said Youth Attack is one of the best extremely fast HC records of the day (the 90’s). It still sounds like a total blur to me sometimes, where I can only kind of figure out what’s happening. Just frantic dick grinding style riffs with a million mile per hour screaming and shouting coliding with it. Also - this features one of my favorite all time samples where the band called Bulldog Records asking if they had any Charles Bronson stuff in stock (”who?”), and then asking if they had One Life Crew records available (”yea”). Still makes me laugh sometimes. Blew my mind when I was 17 or 18 when I heard them (ohhh my God I can’t believe they did that). I think this plays much better than the Bold phone call on that Slapshot lp. Not much slow stuff going on in the tracks just sort of a constant barrage of blasting then a quick break, then some different blasting, although occasionally there’s time for a mosh part to last 4 or 5 seconds.

I wonder if the actor ever got wind of there being a band named after him…

So I was out on the town last night with some of the guys, and by that I mean we went to get some burgers on a Monday, and Voorhees came up in the Ipod shuffle. We switched off the shuffle and started going through our fav Voorhees jams, you know how it is:

“play this one…”

“which is the one that starts out…”

“what record is Death To Pigs on?”

Anyway a while back I wrote about their first 7″, Violent, which is a thrashing HC classic, but the first Voorhees record I actually heard was the What You See Is What You Get 7″, which collects songs from a few different comps or splits on one record, and was made for one of their US tours. It’s also kind of the last really great Voorhees release. Following this there was a turnover in most of the members of the band, and they took on a bit of a different more metal influenced sound. Eventually they did get back to basics and returned to fast hardcore, but it was a bit of a weird trajectory.

At any rate, What You See Is What You Get served as a great introduction to the band. 8 raw throated skull smashers that last about as many minutes when all tallied up. A bit of the old Boston sound (SSD/DYS/NFX — the song Swamped on here even borrows the “Protester” drum beat from Negative FX) and a bit of the old Britcore sound (Heresy/Ripcord/Intense Degree) all crammed into one package. Ian Leck as usual brought the most threatening and throaty delivery to this and the fucking drumming on this (I believe courtesy Michael Gillham) is some of the finest fast skin bashing ever. Jams like Power Trip hurtle their way from one fast part to another, as meat and potatoes as hardcore can get, but that’s the appeal. No melody, no slow stuff, and one single focused emotion, anger. 

This might be kind of a bummer, but my favorite track on this record is actually a cover. In fact it’s one of my all time favorite covers of any band of any genre. The song is “Hinkley Had a Vision” by the Crucifucks, but it’s transformed into the most mean sounding, ‘about-to-snap’ anthem you could imagine. A lot of it is because of the difference in the Crucifucks whiny vocal squeal and Voorhees low growl, but it’s played with more balls out authority in the musical department as well. I’m not actually sure the members of the Crucifucks would approve, I’d wager that Doc Dart would find it to be fascist or something. But when the music cuts out and you’re left with the infamous rant “I wanna take the president/chop off his head/and mail it to them in a garbage bag” in Leck’s thuggish limey bark instead of Dart’s squawk, you feel a surge of sinister power.

 I think the copies with white covers of this record are actually the “tour edition” made in ‘96 (Mister Leck if you still check this blog please confirm). There’s a more common version w/ a black cover. Neither goes for much money so I’d recommend people picking either one before people start to get wise to this band again. One of the best of their decade.

Oh post script, I think all of these guys are still doing music. I know Michael Gillham is doing some sludge punk in the form of Drunk In Hell, and Lecky sings in Meatlocker (did a good lp last year).

Oh one last thing non-Voorhees related: Hatred Surge “Isolated Human” e.p. is out now on Painkiller Records. Grinding violence.

I don’t know what it is, but there’s something that I love about old thrash metal sleeves like nothing else. The combination of poor execution, and ridiculous concept, and all the bright colors and airbrushing too. Many times I’ve bought records for killer sleeves only to have them suck when they hit the stereo back home.

Picked this Virus lp on Metal Works up over the weekend. Pretty good UK thrashing. A bit like the first Onslaught lp, very ignorant with lots of war themes. I expect at least one of these dudes was in a punk band at some point. Very simple, school notebook level art on this one. Totally 2-D.

This Viking Do Or Die lp is an alltime fav that I’ve mentioned before. There was some Dark Angel member involvement and this is almost as good. Lots of good meaty riffs. I think Gene Hoglan may have helped get this band their start, but I’m not entirely sure. The cover looks like it should be some reject power metal band with the terrible logo made of rocks, but this is total Slayer worship.

Love the hell beasts on the cover of Sacrifice’s Torment In Fire. It looks like someone’s high school art project for like a colored pencil unit, which makes sense because on the back of the sleeve none of these dudes look old enough to even vote.

Wehrmacht are a bit more party metal than the rest, as is evidenced by the zombie water skiing on 2 sharks, but at least they’ve got some carnivorous creatures of the deep and a zombie in the mix. I don’t really know how this would work out in real life, I don’t think the zombie would be able to balance and the sharks don’t look to be going that fast. Apparently one of these dudes went on to the band Everclear. Oops.

More Japancore annihilation for you today. Warhead - Drive It In Your Headis probably their most hard to find release, at least stateside. It’s also not necessarily as well liked as their first 2 7″s which are much more high speed and thrashy. Drive It In Your Head works a much more mid paced rockin’ tempo through the tunes but, with the same power drill guitar sound and screaming bloody hell vocals.

Getsuka bursts open with a machine gun style drum fill that starts to lock into a kind of groove back and forth across the toms. Even though it’s a break from the high speed stuff they’d done up to this point, the drumming itself is still actually quite fast, it just doesn’t take the form of a straight beat. Bass and then guitar start to swell over it and then you get the psychotic vocals. They pretty much sound the way the singer of Warhead looked when I saw them in the US in 2006. He had a mohawk, no teeth, and the same clothes at all the shows I saw them at (these were a few weeks apart). A serious lifer. His vocals shred with a kind of highish rasp, some hardcore singers really just end up talking in a scary voice, but this dude is belting it the fuck out. Every muscle on his body has got to be tightening up and as for his actual vocal chords, I can only imagine they look ravaged by machine-gun fire.

Face Crisis [???] continues with the pattern set up on the first song, throbbing bass, heavy drums, and guitars and vocals spiraling close to the edge of total collapse. In some ways I guess this all sounds more modern Japanese than the earlier Warhead stuff, but it’s still too unpredictable and wild to blend in with the crowd over there (like some of the lesser Burning Spirits style groups).

The last track Nichitai is basically some kind of noise-scape built on a cascading drum swell, random blasts of feedback and string noise from the guitars, screeching mic feedback, and wordless screams. This is probably the kind of thing you’d expect from some harsh noisers and at first it does seem like a bit of a throw-away, but it still holds onto the same intensity and broken up chaos of the two more traditional “song” offerings. All around a good way to punctuate the first two songs.

Love the cover on this one with the fighting wolves too. Very noble.

Wondering the best way to tell me happy Valentines day? Buy this and send it to me. Also in a seperate box send a couple of those Resses peanut butter hearts. I think there’s a between a 6 and 24 tests of all the first year of Dischord 7″s. Quad digits on this one or I’ll eat my hat. My favorite HC 7″ ever pretty much.

Amebix - Winter

The Amebix are playing in Providence RI this weekend. I’m pretty psyched although I’m bummed I can’t attend with my pal DFJ. When I say the Amebix are playing, what I mean is the singer (THE BARON!)  and a bunch of scabs, but I think they will actually be pretty cool. Reviews so far have been positive so far, and the setlist reports are promising.

The other night we were driving around listening to the Amebix singles/eps collection and remarking how utterly bizarre of a band they are. I’ve posted about this before, but I guess I’m just getting amped up for the gig on Friday… You see their patches and shirts adorning teens, but there’s nothing straight forward about their sound, it’s not terribly accessible. They’re not ever very fast (which is generally what one would expect from a ‘landmark’ punk band). They employ prominent keyboards at times, and often work a lot of industrial and metal textures into their sound. In short they’re extremely atypical for any style, but especially for beginner level punk.

So, despite being beloved by spiked punkers the world around, the two bands I’m most reminded of on the Winter single are Joy Division and Killing Joke. In the title track, the circular, tribal sounding rhythms, clash with the cold, white noise guitar, and the propulsive, high note bass guitar. It really suggests nothing so much as a monstrous jam between Stephen Morris, Peter Hook, Geordie Walker, and some kind of transiant maniac on the vocals. Winter is a beautiful song in how bleak and churning it is, and well titled at that. It’s hypnotic and highly atmospheric, in some ways because of this, and the contrast of the harsh rasping style vocals, it prefigures a lot of 90’s/00’s black metal. Don’t be mistaken though, The Amebix, no matter how many bands they inspired are their own island to me.

The B-Side, The Beginning of the End, opens with a riff that’s basically Killing Joke’s “The Wait”, transposed in a lower key. Actually the whole song isn’t much more than a variation on “The Wait”, but with your standard anarcho shouts. Honestly, I wish half the bands that name the Amebix as a major influence could get in the ball park of how good this one is. Never mind that it’s barely even their song, they make it an Amebix song by the way they play it and the way it’s mixed. The drums are pushed back into the distance like rolls of thunder, the guitars are little more than sheets of steel grinding against each other, and the vocals come from a place of dark desperation.  Some of the best apocalypse rock ever made.

 The sleeve is a nice fold out that matches the vibe of the music so well, and it’s of course on Spiderleg recs (SDL 010).

Dropdead/Crossed Out split ep. One of the gasps of greatness from the original power violence wave, and one to foreshadow awful 2nd wave trends. For one this is a 5″. The funniest looking, worst sounding format there is. For another it’s a three-way label split. YIKES.

Regardless this is some of the finest material by both bands. Actually in the case of Crossed Out its some of the ONLY material. Kind of a mind melter, but the Crossed Out 7″ was recorded in September of ‘91, this split in February of ‘92, and their second split in October of ‘92. In other words the output of one of the most influential bands in extreme music was all laid to tape at various intervals over about 400 days (unless you count the demo where they’re not really full formed yet). One of the more striking aspects of this Crossed Out material is that it’s much more muddy and lofi than their previous 7″. It’s full of tape hiss, and has almost no treble whatsoever. The vocals are high in the mix and distorted as hell, with the guitar and bass making a thick wall of mud, and the drums sounding like a cave man beating on animal skins. 

Dropdead has been a little more prolific but I’m pretty sure their tracks on here are still in the live set. About 2 minutes and change of high speed, lo-fi crusty grind core… or power violence, or whatever, and it sounds pretty much how they’ve sounded ever since. A blitzkrieg of simple speedy riffs, shrieking throat ripping vocals, and a collision of d-beatish parts, and SSD at double speed. It’s great how much the original hardcore paradigm is just simplified and compacted into the simplest most streamlined form here. Yea there’s bands that have taken it further or gone more extreme, but this is still fully recognizable as hardcore, even though every track runs like 15 or 20 seconds. Only thing that’s kind of annoying - it’s impossible for me to play this side without it starting a couple seconds into the first song, but I’m sure people have been griping about that since it came out.  

Brian if you’re reading this please post about smoking pot and playing sonic the hedgehog with Crossed Out on tour w/ Dropdead. That would be sweet. Only 1000 made ever, and a handful of 7″ versions in the form of test pressings.  

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