Best thing I have seen so far this year.

I couldn't believe this when I saw it at the record store. Shane, my friend who works at the store just gave it to me because I found it so ridiculous. It was in the dollar bin. Someone had to have had a sense of humor when they did this. Pardon the crappy camera phone pic. The vinyl inside is the Simple Minds album from 1979 "Life In A Day."

Reminds me of that Liars EP where they used the Einsturzende Neubauten artwork, but scribbled over it. Comedy gold right there people.

Coolest thing I have heard so far this year:

I'm not uploading this album because it just came out a few months ago. The way I see it, music is music and if it is out there, listen to it. If it is available, buy it. There is nothing worse than a chump that has a a fat Ipod and like 22 CD's that they only still own because they couldn't get more than a few cents for them on amazon. I downloaded this a week ago from Ongakubaka after someone got me hip to it and found it at the record store today so I PURCHASED IT like a good little consumer. Death were a three piece from Detroit in the 70's. You can find their bio all over the net, and plenty of download links I am sure. This is a record that was shelved in 1974 because they were doing it for a big label who wanted them to change their name. Death took a hike and the tapes were shelved until February 2009. So I'll add my insignificant freight car to the hype train. I am going to gush about this one to anyone who will listen. Short of a few quieter bits, this record is raging and feral from beginning to end in true 1970's Detroit/Creem Magazine style. Hearing this for the first time brings back hearing Search & Destroy for the first time at age 18, thinking I knew it all and realizing that I still didn't know shit. I have never been a very big punk fan. The Sex Pistols were overrated and Black Flag sucked more than they were good. All the 'proto punk' stuff gets my blood going though. This album belongs in the same pantheon with The Sonics, The Stooges, The MC5 and The Monks like all the critics are saying and are going to say in the coming months. Expect to hear a piece on these guys on NPR at some point.

What's a big drag is that everyone is going to make a big deal about these guys being black and playing hard rock in the 70's. That's a bullshit reason to talk about these recordings. That's about as lame and sorry as saying "She's a great drummer for a GIRL" or something nearly as bogus. What's remarkable about this mini-album (26 minutes!) is that the SONGS are remarkable. Excellent songwriting, propellant, energetic playing, interesting arrangements. The reason to talk about these recordings and this band is that this is some harsh shit! Whether it was MEANT to be this harsh as a final product is not to be known. Columbia would have liked to have polished this up to a high shine and it would have been about as hairy and scary as any Tony Orlando & Dawn album by the time they were done with it. Major labels always have been, and continue to be the scourge of music. Sadly, the members of the band missed their shot at the brass ring, but had the album been polished and released, would it be seen as such a special thing now? Would it be as raw and amazing sounding? Would the label have watered down what they did, or fuzzed it up and made them into heavy metal 'also-rans'? Or would the label have done what they tried to do with everything back then and tried to make it into disco or something to try and market it to the 'niche' they doubtlessly would have tried to market it to based on skin color? The upshot is, these guys were righteous and stuck to their guns and what happened happened and now we all have the bounty of discovering this, the musical equivalent of finding a $20 bill left in the dryer at the laundromat.

Thank you Drag City for unearthing this undeniable gem. Thank you to the Hackney brothers for not just sitting on these tapes, dragging them out for show and tell every couple of years for family members who may or may not give a damn (I know my family doesn't care much about all the dumb albums I have recorded) I know I have given a damn at least a few times a day for the past 2 weeks or so. I wish they would have finished a few more tracks before getting on Clive Davis's shitlist. This is still the best 26 minutes of music released so far in 2009, I just wish it were more like 40 some-odd minutes.

Visit Death's official blog here, then buy the album online, or at your local independent record store with all due haste.

Mammoth Volume - ...a single book of songs

pardon the janky pic I posted of this album cover. It's really not that interesting anyways, but that is part of the appeal of the album. I need to scan it myself and post a good jpg, and maybe I will at some point. Promises promises. This album is rather personal to me as Daniel Gustafsson, the guitarist has become quite a good friend over the years over email. When this album came out in 2001, I was pretty stunned. My drummer at the time owned a record store and played me the promo. We couldn't figure out if they were trying to be stoner rock, prog or emo. I guess it was all three really. This album came out some months before "Songs For The Deaf" from QOTSA, at least a year before that kind of stuff became the "it" sound for a hot minute. There is a lot of Kyuss in Jorgen's vocals, and alot of King Crimson and Canterbury prog when the band gets to show it (which is often) and an equal helping of Fu Manchu/MC5 when they open up and rock. There is a healthy dose of folk prog and a proliferation of mellotrons, organs, glockenspiels and flutes when the band deems it necessary, and apparently they deem it necessary in the strangest spots sometimes. We couldn't figure out what they were trying to go for, and the band seems none too focused at some points as well, but the results were pretty jaw dropping. They get one of the most natural sounding recordings I have ever heard. It's all room sounds and mic placement (Kalle Berlin gets a bass sound I would trade my eyeballs for.) It's not nearly as self consciously "retro" sounding as fellow Swede travellers Dungen, but it sounds sufficiently 'dusty.' I can't tell if that was willful, or if it was out of necessity, but man, this record sounds unique and GOOD! I have most of Dungen's recordings, and I have most of MV's recordings, and MV recordings would go with me to a desert island first. This album is definitely a slept on classic. Why overhyped, mediocre boogie metal like Alabama Thunderpussy and Orange Goblin got all the attention escapes me. For my money, Mammoth Volume were making interesting, well recorded hard rock and most of the rest of the stoner genre was just so much tepid rehash.

Back when I was absolutely obsessed with this album, I went on the bands website and hit the bios of the individual members. The other three guys had rather dry lists of their gear and maybe a sentence or two about their lives, and general things like "I like beer" or something. Daniel's was an exhaustive and detailed list of the gear he used on the recording of the album and a rambling thesis on what he listened to and how it influenced what he wrote for the album. (btw, he wrote my favorite song on the album: "What Happened In Antioch including A Myriad Of Sounds" [song within a song, how Crimson.] How about a parentheses inside a parentheses?) I hadn't heard of SHIT he had named, entire progressive rock genres like RIO, Zeuhl, and Canterbury and I had no idea what I was in for. I emailed him out of the blue and asked for more recommendations. From that, we started a pan-atlantic freundschaft that endures to this day. At some point over the next couple of months, I ran across a copy of the very Henry Cow album I posted some time back - Leg End. I heard it and flipped and from there started ordering his recommendations. I went a little nuts, and I still do whenever I find something from Univers Zero or Thinking Plague, two bands I discovered from his emails and love to no end.

After 6 or 7 years of sparse and sporadic activity, MV decided to finally put it to bed this past year, to the disappointment of probably a few hundred die-hards like myself. They never even completed an LP's worth of material for a suitable follow up and only released a 5 song collection of MP3's from their website over the last year. It's all good stuff, they never released anything that was terrible and it's all worth purchasing, but "...a single book of songs" is a crowning achievement. It's one of those albums that you either have to BETTER with your next album, or spend the rest of your career trying to recreate the magic. This one would be awfully hard to better. It's an epic wad-blow that was obviously painstakingly crafted from beginning to end. I've never gotten to make an album like that. I DO know how hard it is to make an album of tepid stoner rehash be even remotely well received, and I know how draining it was to get THAT much finished, let alone something that a vast amount of thought, time and creativity went into.

I play the bass

Gently caressing my beloved Rickenbacker. This is footage of one of my bands called The Retrospectres. We play 70's rock songs. I met these guys all about 11 years ago (1998? I'm terrible at math) We feel no need to bother holing up and writing music or anything, so we just play songs that we want to play. If we did take it that seriously, we would probably start to hate each other, so we get together every couple of years and pick another few songs and go out and play some shows. This is the last minute of a Captain Beyond song called "Raging River Of Fear". The ending is very involved and confusing and took us about a month of rehearsals to get it right. Lots of fun to do and a nice sense of accomplishment when we do get it right. This is pretty much the first footage that has ever involved me on YouTube. It would be nice to get an entire song up there though. Our guitarist posted some footage his wife took. If you look for this on Youtube, there are a few other clips. I think one is a Deep Purple song we do, and one is a portion of a Tommy Bolin song we do.

Nukkehammer - demo

I've been a pretty bad mood for the past couple of days. Let's hear it for negativity. I've got it in spades right now.

In honor of said negative vibes, I present all with one of the most negative sounding recordings ever. Nukkehammer's demo cassette was released recently in a run of about 7 copies or something. Oddly enough (and this never happens, because I don't care enough to pay attention to shit) I got onboard early and actually got a copy of the first run. The Sacrosanct Opuscule was responsible for the amazing packaging job, and it was a doozy. Sprayed and screened case (pictured). Printed cassette, obi strip. Very fancy. It's a work of art. There is a second run as well, for info on that, hit the TSO link.

Nukkehammer are crusty, heavy, noisy and brutal. Perfect shitty mood music. They have a song called "Warheads For Coke" What more description do you need? It's punk crusted metal I would say, and the recording is murky as all hell with lots of feedback and hell going on. Fucking inspirational is what I call it. What inspires an even shittier mood than I am already in is the fact that I have to miss their show in 2 Saturdays because I am booked and most likely will not be able to see their set. Pisser.

Disconnected has a logo!

there it is in a small pile of patches we got done this week. We have a much larger stack of them, including the back patch I designed. They are all black ink on either light tan or dark red.

New material is getting mastered by Captain Henry in Nashville, TN as I type. If nothing (else) goes wrong, we should be proofing them next week, deciding what songs are getting used and shipping them out to Idoneum Bello records in Germany. We played last night in Cleveland and short of a few missteps, I would consider it a success, unlike the other show we played which was epic fail. Who knew a triple rectifier running a full marshall stack could equal up to epic fail? Well, we found a way. Last night, the volume was once again totally out of control and nothing seemed to work the way I wanted it too on my end, but we only totally trainwrecked on one song, and we played this show with exactly zero practice since we wrapped up recording. People stared at us, some plugged their ears, but for the most part, everyone stayed in the room. I'll update this post maybe with the full story of how the rest of the show went, but I will say it ended up with the co-mingled odors of red bull, paint fumes, fire retardant, vomit and gunpowder in the air. Quite possibly the pallor of hell itself. Disgusting. Epic fail was not ours this time around. Hell of a story. Maybe I'll get around to blogging about it at a later time. For now, I am glad that I got a logo together and everyone likes it and it looks good.


There is a picture of the backpatch I designed too. I am going to be "That guy" and because I designed it and I like it, and it's my band, I am attaching it to MY denim. This is in a preliminary phase using safety pins to hold it in place until such time as I have an hour free to stitch the bastard on officially. I like it. It's got a guy getting stretched out on the rack and getting hot lead poured down his throat. Awesome.

Univers Zero - Heresie

"redux" story rewritten here, in case anyone's interested:

http://www.bloodsprayer.com/uncategorized/album-of-the-month-univers-zero-heresie-1979/


link removed, buy stuff from Cuneiform instead

Death Side - The Will Never Die

I had never heard the name Death Side before a year ago. I will admit it. I am a Johnny-come-lately to the world of 80's Japanese HC. If I remember correctly, I got in a conversation with someone about Zeke and how they incorporated sick guitar leads into already hyper-charged punk rock. This particular someone knows alot about hardcore and they pointed me at Death Side and their penchant for incorporating almost POWER METAL guitar melodies and solos into raw-as-hell/fast-as-fuck punk rock. This got me sliding into the world of Japanese hardcore punk. Once I scratched the surface, I dug in a little deeper and found alot of cool stuff. Outo, Lip Cream, and S.O.B. alongside Death Side are now absolute favorite bands of mine. Death Side basically started a little known sub-sub-sub catagory of hardcore punk known as 'Burning Spirit' hardcore, characterized by the combination said NWOBHM guitar heroics and a taste for all things Discharge. I have checked out some other 'Burning Spirit' bands and they really don't do a whole lot for me. Sometimes descending a little too far into their own cliche's for my taste. Deathside had it right. Even some of the bands that formed out of Deathside's ashes leave me cold. It's sort of how Tragedy and From Ashes Rise came out in the late 90's and then all these "Epic Hardcore" bands popped up in their wake and just smothered it.

Japan in the 80's was pretty well isolated from what was going on in the rest of the punk rock world. There was no internet, so news travelled slow and import records were subject to all kinds of tariffs and customs taxes. If an album was not licensed in your country, you had to pay top dollar to get it. Japan couldn't get alot of punk from the rest of the world, so they made their own, and the rest of the world be damned. Death Side obviously did things the way they wanted too. Had an American hardcore band at the time tried some of the stuff that Death Side did, they would have been called out on it in a second. Twin guitar leads? Epic solos? That kinda stuff didn't happen in the US, UK or Europe without some shit hitting some fan somewhere. Death Side broke up in the early 90's and splintered into Paintbox, Forward and Judgement. They and a few dozen other bands picked up the Burning Spirit banner and held it and it holds to this day. Sadly, Chelsea, guitarist for Death Side passed away in August of 2007 of apparent complications caused from heat stroke (or so says the internet.) Very few Japanese bands released anything outside of Japan, and kids like me were left to only see the words on the page in the Relapse catalog with prohibitive price tags placed next to them. That's why the internet is so cool. I'm able to find out if something is ACTUALLY WORTH the money people are charging for it.

I went to a punk show a few weeks ago and someone was selling this in their distro. I paid $30 for it. It's not available outside of Japan. I knew it was worth it because I had already heard it. It's the 2CD version with all their EP's and compilation tracks collected. I just did a cursory check on Ebay JUST TO SEE what this goes for and I couldn't find this particular release. I did however find the original vinyl 7" listed twice. One jerk in Japan is listing it with an opening of $80.00. He has like 25 other listings of original vinyls of Outo, Lip Cream, The Comes and a bunch of other rare records listed for equally ludicrous prices. (up to $120!) The sad part is, there is a whole pool of schmucks that are all gonna pay that and more.

What the fuck? Is it Antique Roadshow? Are you all old ladies who collect Hummel figurines and Beanie Babies? That kindof punk rock vampirism makes me sick. I hate the fact that people like to lord it over each other's heads that they have THIS record or THAT record and then have to compare pressings and colored vinyl and stuff. On one level, collecting is fun and I have a healthy CD collection myself. When it gets to a certain point though, I really do feel that it cheapens the music. I'll see someone creaming about something on some forum and I'll find a download link just to see if it's all that and it just SUCKS. It's cool that it came packaged in a ziploc bag filled with sour milk though. I see people buying albums not because they want to hear them, but because they will be able to flip them in a few years for an outrageous amount of money. HOW PUNK. Does it have anything to do with the music anymore? I have a few neat items that I have picked up over the years that I would not like to part with. Most of them are not worth much, but I don't care because I am not going to sell them. I see more and more people caring more about the FORMAT or the item itself than the music. I am hardly what I would consider a 'punk', but I know it is not punk to be paying $200 for some raggedy ass flexi-disc, and fuck you very much for showing it off on some faceless forum. You got jerked, kid. No punk rock is worth that much. Go spend that on a guitar and MAKE your own punk band for cheaper, or press a 7" for your friends band if you have that much loot to throw around.

Merchandise... It keeps us in line.

rant = over

THE WILL<-- disc one
NEVER DIE<-- disc two

Edit: A friend of mine has mentioned to me that he has had problems downloading the second disc (sadly, the better of the two, it being later material and just better developed in general) I had problems with another upload this week. (rough mixes of the new Disconnected material, not for public consumption) If anyone else is having trouble, let me know in the comments. I log into this thing a few times a week even if I only post something once a week or so.

Disconnected / Wasteland split 7"

...is on.

We met out at Bottom Of The Lake studios tonight for our 2nd session and got all the mics run and got a sound dialed in. The cassette was tracked out when it was recorded, this time, the instruments are all being recorded live. Pat is going to go later in the week to do vocals. Pat expressed interest in doing the vocals on the cassette, but we wanted to get it done NOWNOWNOW, so Will335 threw down some ad-libbed lyrics and it came out great. We got Pat ready for it this time. Ok, he's not ready at all, but I don't even know the songs I am recording tomorrow. Why should he? That's just how we roll.

The tracks are being released on Idoneum Bello records out of Bayern, Germany as a split 7" with a band from New Zealand called Wasteland and they rip. Here them rip here. We will be ripping on vinyl together in April if things continue to go as planned. IBR is doing a whole series of split releases with bands who have never released anything on vinyl, so bookmark that link and keep an eye out. I am a follower of his "Am I Mean" blog. He likes to post sick shit like Catharsis demos and all things Haymaker (2 of my all time favorite hardcore bands) and when he put out a cattle call for hardcore bands to do this split series with, I contacted him.

Disconnected only formed in October as a reason for Will335 to write everything for a project like White Trash Rob did with Ramallah (not the best inspiration, but inspiration nonetheless). He and I were going to do a black metal thing for the hell of it, and then he found Jas from Full Scale Panic (still waiting for a copy of their demo, I'll probably post it at some point) so they started writing hardcore. The intention was just to get together and see what happened. No live plans. Then it was actually pretty fucking good, so we did the cassette just to see if we could do it. Will335 duped them in his living room himself while watching "America's Got Talent" or something shitty like that. Go to my first post ever and download the demo if you haven't already. We weren't even planning on playing live. Now dudes in Europe like us and stuff, and our cassette is in a bunch of distros all over the US. I likely will only be playing live on a few dates here and there as I work on the weekends and fests never get booked on Wednesdays. We've talked to a number of bassists who have agreed to take it to the stage for me if needs be. Sure, I'm salty about not being able to play, but they gotta do what they gotta do, and I have to make the doughnuts. None of them will have my 'full custom leafblower' tone either. That can only be created in a laboratory by me with my two secret pedals that the paint has been worn off of, so no one knows what they are. I have to remember what the knobs are for on one of them just to use it!) I am a tone ninja.

Bloodpact - As Good As Dead 7"

I've been looking forward to posting this for a LONG time. This release is why I am doing a blog right now. A year ago I got an ipod and started dumping my music into Itunes. Being the super nerd that I am, I liked to take the discography CDs I have and separate the tracks into the separate releases. I have since decided that this behavior is needlessly annoying and will soon be reconsolidating my OUTO discography, among others, back into single folders. When I put Bloodpact's (a)bastardization compilation into my itunes, I couldn't find coverscans ANYWHERE and realized that one of my favorite bands was TOTALLY unrepresented within the blogs. This was a crime I had every plan of remedying, once I figured out how too. Thusly, after some trial and error, here it is.

I caught Bloodpact at a number of shows and I don't remember being too into it at the time. I was way more into Catharsis and assorted other 'sounds' than the fast stuff back then. Andy's other band, Ruination was much more interesting to me, as were lots of other bands that today I deem far inferior to this release, which I slept on for some years after it's release. I think at the Exclaim show I went to, I bought the (a)bastardization CD in Andy's distro on a whim. It was cheap, I had just been paid and I spend like a pasha at shows if I have the money. Whenever I got around to listening to it, the first 6 songs kicked me in the balls like very little hardcore ever has.

This is my favorite hardcore release of all time. When I saw that it had so little representation on the internet, I actually vowed then and there that I would start a blog at some point to get this record heard, by maybe 8 more people, but heard nonetheless. This record is the reason for the season. Will335 named his band As Good As Dead in honor of this release, and though they are VERY good at what they do, they are a pale shadow compared to the ferocity of this record. This EP is one of the most vicious hardcore platters ever released. Bloodpact were wound tighter than a cheap watch and they were PISSED. Andy's vocals are some of the most focused and intense I have heard since I first heard "Tied Down" from Negative Approach. He has is own trademark rasp that is only marginally related to John Brannon's voice in that they are both yelling. The lyrics I found to be truly remarkable. I am a sucker for some good, well informed social injustice whistleblowing, but tired slogans have never found much of a place in my heart. Bloodpact delivered message lyrics in an odd sort of stream-of-consciousness prose style that didn't question anyone's intelligence, but still made room for hooks and the occasional oddball rhyme scheme without succumbing to repetitive mantra-like gang choruses. Not a tuff guy beat down rhymed couplet to be found, and no fingerpointing or "stabbed in the back" bullshit.

Another gush-worthy point of this record is the drum performance of Dustin Schoenhoefer, who offered his services for some shows and the recording to get the project off the ground. He later rejoined and recorded the final Bloodpact material, which I have never heard. Dustin was playing in Next2Nothing at the time, and went on to be a founding member of Premonitions Of War (where he seriously tore shit up). He plays in Walls Of Jericho now. I'll reserve comment, but I'm glad he's making money and all that. His drum performance on this recording can only be described as unique and propellant. I won't go any further than to say to pay attention to the drums your second or third time through listening to it.

Andy's new band is called Nightbringer, and they are one of my absolute favorite bands right now. Very much more Motorhead/JapHC influenced than Bloodpact, who, though exceedingly fast, were far more thrash metal. I implore you to follow their exploits here or suffer your fate bereft of their influence on your pathetic life.

I ripped these from my copy of (a)bastardization. If you want the scratchy vinyl pops and stuff, tough titty. Go track down the vinyl you snob. In the meantime, enjoy hearing the songs on any format you wish to transfer these to. The original 1999 7" release was only 6 songs. 2 more songs were recorded for compilations. One is a 7 Seconds cover. I put them in too because they were all the same recording session. I borrowed Will's copy of the 7" for the scans I included. This has never been repressed, so even if you have a copy, yours wouldn't look much better, so no bitching about the spot of mold on the front. I think there were only 100 of the red vinyl pressed. 10 were packaged in ammunition cases or something ridiculous like that and a couple hundred came out on regular black vinyl I would imagine. My scanner isn't big enough to accomodate the entire insert at one time, so I had to scan the inside in 2 parts and cobble them together in photoshop. I hope no one can see my splice.

give it up, you suckers

Exclaim - Critical Exploder

What a kick in the head this album was. Some friends of mine had an extra seat in the car to go see Hellnation back in 2001 (I guess, or at least that is what the Youtube footage of the show says) It doesn't seem to me like it was that long ago, but I guess it was. I had never heard them, but I knew they were a well known name in the power violence/grindcore world and that was good enough for me. They were playing with some Japanese hardcore band too. I didn't know much about Japanese hardcore past seeing the name S.O.B. bandied about in metal magazines in the early 90's because every grind band ever named them as an influence and Dan Lilker wore their T shirts. I figured it would be good shit. I didn't know nothing. Hellnation was totally underwhelming. Sloppy, muddy, one dimensional. Kinda boring really. I spent most of their set digging through distro and spending too goddamned much money. The Japanese guys hit the stage on Hellnation's equipment and proceeded to DESTROY. They weren't necessarily tight, they just sorta hacked away at their guitars, shrieked alot and played the drums super fast. It was just total energy blitzkrieg. I bought this CD and a T shirt and the blitzkrieg continued once I put the album in. This album is the sound of punk chewing it's fingernails off. It's red eyed cocaine anxiety terrorizing a preteen sleepover. This album is the hardcore equivalent of a bandsaw locking up on a piece of sheet metal.

I don't think they even heard each other or cared if they were playing the same song. The crowd tried going apeshit a couple of times, but in grand Midwestern style, did nothing really. Blank stares, jaws agape. Any time a pit was started, it was ignored until it went away. We rustbelters are masters at choking a pit out. Exclaim was underwhelmed with us it seemed. The lead singer pointed at people and said stuff about them to the other band members that made them laugh. We didn't understand what he was saying. It didn't matter really. We deserved to be called whatever he was calling us for being lame. However I have influenced your thoughts, dear reader, I guarantee they have not prepared you for what this album ACTUALLY sounds like. It came out on Sound Pollution, and they are going tits up, so this isn't something you will find anytime soon. This album doesn't seem to have much of a blog presence and that is a shame. I think when it came out, it was a bit of a curiosity. It's shrieking feedback, completely overdriven sound and almost total lack of clarity probably perplexed most. I'm sure it influenced some of the rawer HC bands operating today like Coke Bust and Sex Vid (I know it influenced Disconnected an awful lot). This is fast, noisy and harsh. Comedically harsh. Harsh to an extreme that only power electronics practitioners like Masami Akita and Wolf Eyes take it. Confuse fans take note. This might even be of some interest to some of the Aquarius Records cassette only black metal set due to it's absurdly and intentionally raw nature.

"more scream, high energy"

It's time to celebrate the blastbeat!!!!

A couple of posts ago, I mentioned it being Blastbeat Celebration day on January 29th. Guess what? That day is today. In honor of said day, I offer what I name as the SINGLE GREATEST GRINDCORE ALBUM of all time. Discordance Axis - The Inalienable Dreamless. All the elements of this band total up to being the greatest grindcore band of all time too. This band's entire catalog is vicious and precise. It's the sonic equivalent of that SUV that travels in the president's motorcade, but has the popup top that a guy strapped into a Gatling gun pops out of. The CD comes packaged in a DVD case and looks like a video on meditation instructions, then you put it in and BAM! 3,000 armor piercing round a minute. Grindcore. Sure, Napalm Death invented it, Carcass added a little melody here and there. Terrorizer and Assuck made it be worth a little more than the ironic one second song. Since then really, nothing progressed the genre until this record. All since this release have either been slavish followers of this albums design (Pig Destroyer, Magrudergrind) or just have not been that good at it (I won't name names) Judging by the prices on Amazon, it's probably still available, so if you download it and like it, buy it somewhere or order it. I know Hydrahead reissued the Jouhou and Original Sound Version albums too, which total up to the entire recorded output of this band. Jon Chang (vocalist) has a new band called Gridlink that adhere's pretty close to what this album was doing. Discordance Axis imploded like six times during it's existence. The final nail went in the coffin when guitarist Rob Marton was diagnosed with a condition where the loud volume he would play at would caused his entire body to be wracked with pain for days after DA would play a show. Talk about an achilles heel. Dave Witte handles the celebrated blast beats on this recording, and they are numerous. He's still one of the greatest in the world. No bullshit gravity blasts, always one foot.

Leg End by the rock and roll musical group Henry Cow

Continuing in the recent tradition of me making grandiose statements about albums I possess and how they changed my life by being the greatest music ever created, Henry Cow did no less than that about 6 or 7 years ago. I had bought all the REALLY GOOD Yes albums. Being a bass player, I had studied Rush. I had listened to King Crimson and Jethro Tull too. I had even gotten an anthology of Return To Forever. I thought I had nothing left to learn about progressive rock. It was all right there. Prog: Epic songs, silly lyrics, sometimes they used flutes, saxophones and violins, Roger Dean and/or Hipgnosis designed album covers, usually an organ or mellotron was involved. I ran across a mention of the band Henry Cow from the band Swedish band Mammoth Volume. I got into them about 2001 when they released "A Single Book Of Songs". I checked out their website and the guitarist, in his 'bio' dropped the words Zeuhl, RIO and Canterbury explaining about where his inspiration came from while writing the album. I emailed him and asked him to recommend some more to me. Henry Cow is not a band name you forget easily, and when I ran across a copy of Leg End, used, in town for $6, I jumped on it. He and I actually still maintain contact to this day. It's an email 'bromance' necessitated by a mutual love for all things Zappa. Just yesterday actually, I opened up the mailbox to find a DVD he sent me with 38 Swedish prog and psyche albums he burned for me.

This album was music I had been looking for all my life, screwball harmony, neverending arrangements that don't repeat. Leg End was a very weird crossroad where musical improvisation and structured composition met and shook hands. Fred Frith was a name I knew from the band Naked City (Who's album "Torture Garden" I credit for 'weirding' me at a young age.) Henry Cow was his first big endeavor in the late 60's and early 70's. Somewhere along the way, they coined the term "Rock In Opposition" (RIO). RIO isn't exactly a style as it is a group of oddball jazzrock groups from the early 70's who all played a festival of the same name. Over the years, bands who cite Henry Cow and Samma Mammas Manna as influences automatically get tagged RIO. None of them sound the same.

No two Henry Cow albums sound the same either. Some are instrumental, some feature vocalists and lyrics. Leg End is instrumental aside from some wordless choral work buried in the mix at a couple of points. Enough has been written about them on the internet that finding out more stuff about them should not be an issue so I will refrain from misquoting Wikipedia and making this post longer than it needs to be, just know that I LOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVELOVE this album and you should too.

Il Balletto Di Bronzo - Ys

It's odd that two of my favorite albums of all time are both named 'Ys'. This album and the Joanna Newsom album of the same name. At some point, I'll look up what it is a reference to. For now, I don't care too much. They are both awesome albums. This one especially.

Most who know me, know that I have a deep seated passion for dusty old progressive rock. It's almost as deep an obsession as crusty old death metal. This is the album that started me down the path. My band was on tour some years ago and we had the opportunity to play a benefit show on a Saturday night at the legendary CBGB's. We stayed with a friend of the band who lived 6 blocks from the club. We made it to their place the night before the show, so I knew if I got up early enough, I could go spend the day combing the record stores on St. Mark's Place. I know it wasn't the greatest shopping trip I was going to have, but I essentially only had 4 or 5 hours to find a souvenir or two from my first trip to NYC. I asked Dan where would be good to start (Mondo Kim's was the only suggestion I remember) and what to get. I was just getting into 70's prog at this point and I saw he had some pretty choice selections in his music rack. He said the best purchase I will ever make in my life will be if I look for an Italian band called Il Balletto Di Bronzo, as if I was ever going to remember that name. Lo and behold, I remembered enough of the name to recognize it when I saw it and based on Dan's high praise, the fact that he was a published author, and had an extremely potent CD collection, I bought it without having heard a note.
The album is singular and extraordinary. It has a heavy dose of symphonic ELP bombast going on within it, but a darkness and foreboding that ELP would never touch because it might scare away the investors. Evil, baroque jazz? Italy had some sort of connection with the prog in the 70's that no other country came close to. The bands that came out of that scene were some of the most intense songwriters and players of the era. Banco Del Mutuo Soccorso, Museo Rosenbach, Osanna, Quella Vecchia Locanda, AREA. Each one TOTALLY burning in their own rights (especially AREA). 'Ys' is quite possibly the album that I consider the BEST of the whole Italian lot. Lots of heavy, neoclassical organ work, mixed with an almost jazz pulse at points. Vocals have an opera-like quality without being annoying. The music itself can go from Mars Volta manicness to a simple 3 note vamp in the space of a few measures AND IT WORKS FRIGHTENINGLY WELL.
I don't know what they are singing about, but that never seems to matter to me. Like 60% of my music collection is music where you can't understand the words anyways, so what's it matter if it's in a different language. In the grand scheme of things, Yes, ELP and Pink Floyd were good guy prog. King Crimson, Van Der Graaf Generator and Jethro Tull were bad guy prog. Il Balletto lean totally to the dark side. If you have a thing for minor chords, creepy keyboard sounds, impish backing vocals and an almost occult darkness to the music, this album couldn't be more right.

bronzo

Blastbeat Celebration day is January 29th

no shit, I'm not kidding, click here for the story

Have you hugged a blastbeat today? If not, on January 29th, go over to your CD or vinyl collection, pick up that copy of 'Horrified' from Repulsion and give it a gentle reminder that you appreciate it's very existence. If you don't own Repulsion, (because you are aimless, stupid and bereft of all that is decent) then figure out what the oldest album is in your collection that contains a blastbeat, or possibly the first time you ever heard one and APPRECIATE it. Since I have a blog, I will blog about it.

Mine was most likely in Maze Of Torment from Morbid Angel off Altars Of Madness. Either that or the opening riffs of Premature Burial from Malevolent Creation. Technically, it may have been something off 'Dealing With It' from DRI, which was also the reference that most of the blast-beat progenitors cite as the sounds that ultimately influenced their own creations. I used to tune into the metal show on the local college radio station and listen in every friday night. It became a ritual by about age 14 actually. I'd go to the mall and look at all the cassettes in the metal section at Camelot and take note of what had the nastiest album artwork. Come friday night, I'd tune in to the metal show, call the station and read off my list and make the decision for how I was spending the next week's allowance.

I didn't have cable back then, so people would call me on Sunday and tell me what they had taped the night before on Headbanger's Ball and I would head over to watch them after school during the week. One day, my friend called me and told me I had to come over and watch a video he had taped. I was a budding bassist and it was the video for 'Jerry Was A Racecar Driver' from Primus. Never saw a bass player do THAT before. After the video was over, he tried talking to me about it, but I was already tranfixed by the grainy, film school shitty footage of a church steeple and the opening drum fill of the next video. It was 'Suffer The Children' from Napalm Death. Everything was heavier, faster, and more intense than anything else I had ever listened too. Barney Greenway's roar was massive and their drummer looked like Squiggy from Laverne & Shirley. After about a minute, I got too SEE my first blastbeat. Everything was a little different after that. I started to live for the blast. The 2 beat thrash polka just wasn't enough anymore, no matter how fast it was played. If it didn't have blast beats, it wasn't worth listening too. Terrorizer's World Downfall ranked for a long time as the greatest grind album of all time for me, bumped out of the top spot by none other than "The Inalienable Dreamless" from Discordance Axis. Arguably, THE perfect grind album.

I'm not much for holidays. If they are a day off work, they are usually an annoyance for me when EVERYFUCKINGTHING is closed all over the area and I can't get shit done, or even get a decent cup of coffee somewhere. International Blastbeat Celebration Day is a holiday I can get behind though. None other than Erich Keller is the guy advocating it. He was in Fear Of God, who created some pretty vicious proto-grind back in 86 on some of the roughest recordings ever made. It could have been grindcore, it could have been a microphone placed dangerously close to a running blender with pieces of silverware in it. Hell, if it wasn't for triggers (the scourge of metal if you ask me) MOST blast beats could be that, and most SHOULD.

Goatsnake - Flower Of Disease

Apparently, I am in one of those stoner/doom moods today. This is the BIG DADDY doom album for me. If you are a doom fan and have any respect at all for the doom of yore, in your mind you have a throne carved out of solid black obsidian. In that throne sits the ultimate and first doom album (and arguably, the first heavy metal album at all) The self titled Black Sabbath. It is THEE heavy, it opens with THEE riff, it is THEE alpha. The following five Sabbath albums are a royal court of sorts, but we are not discussing them, enough has been written about the Sabbath. Perched atop that obsidian throne with folded wings, holding all around it within it's steely gaze, clinging fast to it's lord's every command, striving for it's master's approval is the doom of now represented by a single album. It's not in the royal bloodline, it's not even the same species as royalty, but it makes sure that the doom of yore is not forgotten. It is the protector and the enforcer.

The album is different for different people. For some it is Epicus Doomicus Metallicus from Candlemass. For some it may be Forest Of Equilibrium from Cathedral. Others may feel it is Sleep's Holy Mountain or Turn Loose The Swans from My Dying Bride. For me, it is Flower Of Disease from Goatsnake.

I don't know exactly why the stars aligned for me on this one. It could have been any of the aforementioned albums really. It just struck me the instant I heard it. Greg Anderson's molasses guitar tone, the way the riffs swung from Greg Roger's drumming. Pete Stahl's incredible voice. The vocal melodies (dare I say, soaring? Celine Dion it's not.) Everything. In some ways, it betters the formula. It never boogie's, but there is a southern rock drawl to it that keeps it just shy of falling straight into the classic doom catagory. It never drones, but there is something strangely reverent about the way the riffs are treated by the vocals, and how the vocals are treated by the riffs. The songs don't often even shamble past the 7 minute mark. They actually keep pretty close to the 5-6 minute range, which for some of the windier doom bands, can be a radio edit. For the windiest, a snippet.

This is hands down, one of the most stick-to-the-ribs doom metal albums of all time. Every song has that payoff, and you don't have to sit through 20 minutes of mournful wailing to get to it. This is doom metal that means business. The songs are as abrupt and complete as Goatsnake's own abbreviated career (2 full lengths, 3 EP's) This was released long before the current doom-chic trends became de riguer for the skinny pants/fixed gear bike hipster set. I blame Isis.

rateyourmusic has an amazon.com feed that I peeked at when getting the cover art for this post. Flower Of Disease is currently going for $49.00. This gets my hackles up. Fucking greedheads. When I got this CD, Southern Lord was literally GIVING it away with every Goatsnake T shirt purchase. High five to me for being proactive. Until such time as the price actually comes down though:
put this in your ipod and smoke it

Pearls And Brass

Alright, my blog is starting to look like an actual blog that someone cares about. It's been far below freezing this entire winter, so I took what little disposable income I had saved up and sank it into a laptop and some software because I KNEW I was gonna be broke and freezing cold the entire month of January and would need to occupy myself while staying warm by my space heater. I've been dicking around with photoshop, learning some (very) rudimentary tricks as well as figuring out what to do to make this blog function a little more proper.



This album makes me happy. Really happy. There are very few bands in existence today that can apply such a scope of colors to one album using only guitar, bass, vocals and drums. To find a fair comparison to this album, one would have to stretch back a few decades and even then you would not find a good match. Pearls And Brass quietly dropped this album and (for me) flew right past heavy fuzz resurgents like Guitar Hero dandies Priestess and stoner pop princes Queens Of The Stone Age to craft an album much more precious than their vastly more popular contemporaries.

In a perfect world, P&B's output will be remembered with some small reverence not too unlike the early Groundhogs catalog, or Gary Moore's Skid Row. I would be unfair to compare this album to the first Captain Beyond album, but I think of the two as kin in my head because of the acoustic interludes countered against proggy fuzz attack. CB's interludes are more in the classic prog catagory, whereas P&B's lie closer in with doomy modal blues like Robert Johnson and wierdo acid folk like First Utterance from Comus. This album got REALLY popular around here because one of the independent record stores jumped on it and sold something like 60 copies of it within a month because they wore the grooves out playing it in the store. Just about everyone that walked through the door for a year got treated to hearing that album, and just about everybody that walked through the door, if they enjoyed the sound of an electric guitar at all had a good reason to buy it.

Pearls And Brass had it all; acoustic slide jams, early Grand Funk Railroad fuzz guitar attack, well thought out riffs that never ended and sometimes never repeated, vocal hooks galore, and the occasional stomping Sabbath doom-out. They were incessantly sold out and ordering more copies. When Pearls And Brass toured, our dumb city may have been one of the better markets for them to play. I opened for them twice and the shows were both nicely attended (and my bands shows were RARELY nicely attended.) We were out on a weekend roadtrip at one point, had a night off and saw that P&B were playing a bar we were familiar with and went and it was a GHOST TOWN. Had the band all to ourselves. At that point, live, they were already shirking off alot of the first albums material and they were playing the far more manic material off their upcoming second album "The Indian Tower", which is great, but I think all the songs sounded the same, though the lone acoustic track BLEW AWAY the three acoustic tracks on the first album. After they broke up, Randy Huth, the guitarist and vocalist did an acoustic solo album called Randall Of Nazareth. His style of writing and playing is captivating and singular. It would be worth your while to track it down (it's on Drag City I think, so it can't be too hard to get ahold of) if you like any of the acoustic moments on this album.

This recording is natural sounding and highly representative of what one would hear at the show. No processed vocals or 15 layers of guitars or triggered drums. Just good solid playing. I considered these guys the top of the heap of the fuzz resurgence, dusting more popular bands like Priestess and Dead Meadow (but not Dungen, who can do no wrong). After releasing the second album, P&B did their few tours and went on indefinite hiatus. Thankfully, these recordings will never go on hiatus. This is one of my favorite albums of all time, despite the ugly cover artwork. Hell, it's not like I can do any better.

"my bleeding hands, tearing up the ground"

Best of 2008

This year beats the hell out of last year. Last year I couldn't name ten good albums by the end of the year. This year I keep kicking stuff off this list so I can add stuff I forgot about. I may try and get slick and add pics of these albums, but this is what kicked my ass this year.

1. KayoDot - Blue Lambency Downward
2. Enslaved - Vertebrae
3. Samothrace - Life's Trade
4. Nachtmystium - Assassins: The Black Meddle
5. Ocean - Pantheon Of The Lesser
6. Earth - The Bees Made Honey In The Lions Skull
7. World Burns To Death - Graveyard Of Utopia
8. Black Mountain - In The Future
9. Leviathan - Massive Conspiracy Against All Life
10.Dungen - 4

kinda in that order, and subject to change without notice

edit: James brings up a good point, Burning Witch - Crippled Lucifer is the best reissue this year, runner up goes to the Reek Of Putrefaction reissue for the best packaging. Nothing on the horizon for next year. I give half of a shit about the new Mastodon, what they have been saying about it is pretty intriguing. Hopefully it isn't the same gobbledygook that Blood Mountain was.

NEXT2NOTHING - To Have Courage, But No Conscience 7" +

1996 and Pants were baggy, mosh was hard, breaks were fast, shit was talked, backs were stabbed, bonds were broken. These were during those years before Hatebreed breakdowns and kids still danced when the music was fast. Our town actually had a scene for a minute. All the Detroit venues got shut down, so N2N started booking the shows at their house and all the Detroit folk would come and it actually seemed like a scene for about a year. I was in the periphery. I still am. I like it that way.

"To Have Courage..." was Next2Nothing's only release. It was a clusterfuck. Among other things, the recording was pretty tinny, the covers didn't get made until a year and a half after the vinyl was pressed, and by that time, the thanks list was totally obsolete. Still, it is what it is and it is a moment in time.

An ex member gave me a copy of the 7" just recently and kicked me some rips of the tracks. There are 4 additional songs from a later recording session that pretty much smoke the 7" tracks. I only have the digital tracks though, and they were ripped at 128 by someone other than myself. The sound can't be helped much really even if they were 320. The band had a couple of recording sessions that never got released and everything I heard was ridiculously good. I wish someone would collect the original masters and get all that shit mastered, if only for people who remember because it was surprisingly good and has held up well over the years. For the time, they got pretty far, playing with most of the second tier metalcore and hardcore bands of the day on numerous tours. N2N had their own thing going on. Speed, breakdowns, hooks, straightforward (yet well written) lyrics, heart, ambition. There really aren't many bands to compare these guys too because once again, they didn't fit in any sub-genre very well. Too fast for metalcore, too hardcore to be POST hardcore, too negative to be posi, too metal to be youth crew, not fast enough to be thrashcore, not political at all, and they weren't ridiculous enough to be "Holy Terror" hardcore. Midwest negative hardcore. You understand if you are from one of these industrial wasteland megapolii that are closing up for business as we speak. It's the same sort of muck and filth that set the Cuyahoga on fire and spawned Cleveland hardcore. N2N ultimately were a footnote, and should have been more

Habitual Coercion 2007 CDR demo

On to the metal. This is the 2007 CDR demo from Habitual Coercion, a NW Ohio death metal band of whom I have not seen their demo being shared ANYWHERE, and that is a shame. This is in the same catagory as old Cephalic Carnage and Origin and just as good. Brutal, techy, grindy, and occasionally they throw you a hook. Hooks are typically unheard of in death metal today.

Bo gave his blessing to post this so there is some kind of digital presence for their demo since they consistently forget to burn new ones. He's the bass player and he just got endorsed by Spector basses, and for that I am envious. Endorsements are sweet, they have a ton of them. I'd kill for an Ashdown endorsement.

click this