“And through this revolting graveyard of the universe the muffled,
maddening beating of drums, and thin, monotonous whine of blasphemous
flutes from inconceivable, unlighted chambers beyond Time; the
detestable pounding and piping whereunto dance slowly, awkwardly, and
absurdly the gigantic, tenebrous ultimate gods—the blind, voiceless,
mindless gargoyles whose soul is Nyarlathotep.”— H.P. Lovecraft,
“Nyarlathotep”
It’s time we talk about grindcore’s dirty secret. For 30 years—literally from the very first moment—grind musicians have been cheating on you with the must un-metal of instruments: the saxophone. (Yes, I know, literally, that's it made out of metal. You know what I mean, smart ass!) Saxophone is that instrument your parents tried to foist on you when they misunderstood what exactly you meant when you told them you wanted to join a band. It’s probably not the instrument you picture yourself shredding on a stage in front of throngs of panty-throwing fans.
Ladies.
However, it’s probably got more of a grindcore pedigree than you’d credit it at first blush. Its reedy wail has been adding an extra frisson to the wonted arsenal of slashing guitars and thumping drums for decades. If nothing else, dabbling in odd instrumentation will probably get you street cred as a serious musician who’s not afraid to test barriers. Also expect lazy reviewers to drop the term “jazzy” a lot when describing your song. “Any band with a saxophone that doesn't play ska will eventually be described as jazz,” Dead Neanderthals saxophonist Otto said. “I'm really not into traditional jazz but love free jazz. Maybe we're a little jazz in that sense.” Saxophone grind is still a bit of a novelty, and I’m certainly not advocating making it a full time thing, but maybe it’s time we recognize it’s not as incongruous as it sounds at first blush.
Extreme metal vocals are largely just another blunt instrument – one more unintelligible weapon in a band’s arsenal of noise. For the most part, that’s all they really need to be, another tool in the mix. There’s not exactly a lot of down time in grind songs. So when the band gets rolling, singers are left to try and keep pace and fight for space in the mix. But occasionally savvy musicians will know when and how to pull back. Putting the vocals forefront and providing a moment of clarity can really punctuate a song both lyrically and musically. Slamming the music to a halt to let the vocals stand on their own is a great attention grabber when done right. Here’s a handful of ways it’s been put to good use.
You Scream, I Scream
Southern crust punkers Antischism were pissed off. They wanted to scream. They wanted you to know that they wanted to scream. So on the song “Scream” they built in space for vocalist Lyz to make that point readily apparent. The result is a musical pause that gives Lyz the space to “SCREAM!” She’s screaming about the need to scream which is all kinds of cathartic and meta at the same time.
Drugs of Faith mastermind Richard Johnson made potent use of the musical pause on Corroded’s ode to rationality over religion “Age of Reason.” To punctuate his point about the value of freethinking, the song holds its breath long enough for him to scream out his intention to live “WITHOUT. THE. FAIRY. TALES.” From there, the song chooses to slowly spool out, as though all of the rush had built up to that single, powerful moment and then gave up in exhaustion. It makes the point that much more powerful.
You’re Hot Then You’re Cold
Jesus’ favorite grinders Rehumanize turn the book of Revelation’s tale of the lukewarm church at Laodecia into a grinding nightmare of vengeance and dismay on the song “Planet Loadecia.” While the song doesn’t come to a full stop, clearly its centerpiece is the relatively clean middle section where the band, personifying God, announce that “I WILL SPIT YOU OUT OF MY MOUTH.” Taken as a tale of divine retribution, that’s the moment when the implacable deity has passed judgment and only doom will follow. There can be no appeal and no reparations. Justice from that point on is swift and merciless.
I submit to you that Assück’s Anticapital is the greatest album cover in grindcore. There may be images that are more iconic, more striking and more artistic. But Anticapital manages to perfectly embody and define everything that grindcore’s first and second waves stood for. Anticapital boasts a deceptively simple image for a no-frills band that believed in the power of grindcore’s to the point aggression. First, the 1991 album’s black and white aesthetic is a throwback and nod to the crust punk that birthed and defined the earliest grindcore practitioners. It harkens back to Crass, Discharge and a whole wave of Scandinavian imitators who wore sketchy lo-fi, DIY visuals as a badge of honor. It’s also a refinement of Napalm Death and Siege’s aesthetic, adding a compositional balance and refinement to grindcore’s earliest visual cut and paste, home sketched lexicon. The image is also conceptually weighty; it’s got the artistic and intellectual chops to stand next to Assück’s lyrical bile. The man lashed to a gear, slave to the industrial processes that dominated the 20th Century and its rush to prosperity, is also a metaphor for how the common man feels in the face of those faceless, implacable, unrelenting forces. Industrialization lifted much of the world’s population up from nothing and gave them a prosperity they could never previously attain. However, it also threatened that existence as processes became more refined and automated. Humanity saw itself become obsolete as more jobs were taken out of its hands and transferred to machinery. Whether intentional or not, the image also calls to mind Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times as workers try to keep up with the insatiable demands of the industrial line. Eventually, their very bodies are sucked into the machinery, human grease for the wheels of progress.
That unease would only grow throughout the late 20th and early 21st Centuries as modernization and globalization meant that not only machines but cheap labor a globe away could snatch back that very same prosperity they proffered. It’s the uneasy relationship between man and the means of production that give him the life he craves that makes the visual work. Like good political dissidents, Assück's art turns Marxist agitprop on its head, questioning the value of the very same industry that promised the workers a new life of ease. Revolutionary firebrands that they were, Assück’s imagery also evokes ’60s political activist Mario Savio’s famous “gears of the machine” speech where he exhorted student protestors to stand in the way of the forces that were arrayed against them. Students’ very bodies needed be the protest that called faceless power to account for its actions.
All of those associations feed into the rage that fueled Assück. It’s an image that not only perfectly encapsulates what made Anticapital amazing; it also strikes a visual tone that embodies the spirit that motivated grindcore’s progenitors. It’s an image that perfectly assembled and balanced all of the elements that were in play at the time, creating a striking amalgam. Grindcore is full of indelible imagery, from The Inalienable Dreamless’ stunning seascape and Drop Dead’s skulls to Reek of Putrefaction’s meat collages and Sounds of the Animal Kingdom’s man-beast hybrid. Each image is the first portal into the music within. But very few images, such as the Anticapital art, so precisely define not only an album but a whole wave of musical innovators.
One of my pet peeves is how punks are often portrayed in popular culture. Too often they’re the lunkhead with the ridiculous clothes and hair who is treated like a running punchline. The image of the idiot punk is so ingrained that they’re almost automatically assumed to be falling down drunks who are little more than comic relief devoid of personality or prospects whenever they pop up. In my experience, it’s the direct opposite. Punks are the musical smart asses: the intelligent kid in the back of the room who can do the work but just doesn’t take it seriously. It takes a keen mind to zero in on society’s myriad failures in a way that’s hilarious, excoriating and trenchant all at once.
But some punks have taken that a step further by putting their diplomas where their mouths are, earning some serious academic accolades outside of the mosh pit.
Insert tired fucking cliché about books and covers [HERE]. Well worn bromides of questionable veracity aside, a good cover and an innovative package in the hands of a clever designer can actually enhance the album experience. While album art and packaging are meant to convey quickly what a record’s about (“Hey, this has Ed Repka zombies on the cover; it must be the new Taylor Swift album,” said nobody ever), the designs can actually take music and elevate it by providing another entryway into the art. A good visual and a design that invites close study and an extra minute of thought can even elevate albums that were otherwise forgettable failures. Here are five albums that stepped up the game on the visual side.
Discordance Axis The Inalienable Dreamless Hydra Head 2000 The Inalienable Dreamless looks like no other album before or since. Jon Chang’s meticulous design ensured that Discordance Axis’ final album would stand out from all of their peers and competitors (even if it did get grindcore’s defining moment mistakenly exiled to the DVD section of many retailers). Most obviously, The Inalienable Dreamless came packaged in a DVD case, which gave a wider, more cinematic aspect ratio to the wrap around horizon and seascape the band chose for the art. If most album art was in a TV aspect, Discordance Axis had jumped to wide screen. The colors and imagery gave no hint to The Inalienable Dreamless’ content and the illegible logo, tiny script for the album title and lack of even song titles and a bar code on the packaging ensured the album would be an enticing mystery for those brave enough to peek inside. And inside, fans would find a larger than usual booklet that was laid out to look like a journal, just one more personal touch that made The Inalienable Dreamless the endlessly fascinating musical landmark it remains today.
Coldworker The Contaminated Void Relapse 2006 Coldworker’s music vacillates between inoffensively forgettable to insultingly unlistenable. But the one thing Anders Jakobsson’s post-Nasum project got perfect was the art for debut album The Contaminated Void. Relapse’s resident visual maestro Orion Landau crafted a clever booklet for the album that includes clear cellophane overlays that alter the art a page at the time, concealing and revealing the Breugellian horror behind, framing and then exposing the hellish slasher film revelry. Coldworker never deviated much from the well worn themes of death, decay, betrayal and misery and even then weren’t album to elevate their material beyond the legions of similarly minded metallers, but the booklet art is enough to keep you coming back periodically to experience The Contaminated Void against the backdrop of such a striking package. Relapse has to be applauded for cracking open its wallet for such a visually inventive presentation. It’s just a shame it wasn’t in service of a better album.
Creation is Crucifixion Child as Audience Hactivist Media 2001 Child as Audience is many things: Creation is Crucifixion’s best sounding effort, a didactic lesson in critical theory by a droning, monotone lecturer and a whole Anarchist’s Cookbook full of practical cultural and technological subversion suggestions. Against all of that, the three songs, which were some of Creation is Crucifixion’s best, can understandably get lost. At the center of the unassuming brown cardboard box, a nod back to the brown paper bags used to sell dirty magazines in the bad old days, is an inch think multilingual book that lays out the Creation is Crucifixion manifesto on education, liberty and authoritarianism. Child as Audience is intent on subverting the methods used to indoctrinate children, instead turning them into opportunities to learn the principles of radical anarchism. Creation is Crucifixion provide one means for subverting indoctrination by detailing instructions for reverse engineering old Nintendo Gameboy cartridges to create games that teach children the joys of of their own sexual development while reinforcing the message that authority figures can never be trusted. That’s a hell of a lot to cram into a package that contains less than 15 minutes of music.
Graf Orlock Doombox Vitriol Records 2011 Graf Orlock’s creative packaging is so legendary it probably deserves a post of its own from the face-hugger CD-holder of Destination Time Tomorrow to the multiple foldout fronts of Destination Time Today. The attention to detail they put into their offerings is meticulous and a large part of the band’s charm. But the cinephile grinders absolutely outdid themselves with the stunning Doombox. The 2011 release not only included the band’s entire discography to date, but the whole kit ‘n’ kaboodle folded out into a giant ass boombox to hold your precious filmcore records. The whole concept is deliberately over the top but it also perfectly encapsulates Graf Orlock’s passion for film and their go for broke approach to music and presentation. It’s that kind of time and budget killing vision that lets you know Graf Orlock view their music as something more serious than a revenue stream.
Pig Destroyer Book Burner Relapse 2012 However disappointing Book Burner might have been musically, the packaging, especially for those of us who shelled out for the two CD digipack, does admirably reflect Pig Destroyer’s lyrical themes and ambitions. The book-bound digipack, which includes J.R. Hayes’ short story “The Atheist,” feels like a tome in your hands. It's like a samizdat missive from the dystopian world of Hayes’ imagination and that does help reinforce the themes Pig Destroyer were trying to build on Book Burner. Now none of that redeems flaccid music, a stale concept and a trite, poorly written short story, but it does show some forethought and an eye toward worldbuilding. The term concept album gets tossed out too casually for every wanking prog band that slaps together a handful tunes about calculus, but Book Burner at least tried to create a complete packing from the art to the presentation to the music that established multiple entry points into their blighted landscape. It was ultimately a failure, but it was a failure that took a chance.
A petty criminal, The Room’s only character, sits in a jail cell awaiting his trial. Isolated physically and emotionally, the unnamed narrator spins elaborate fantasies of increasingly violent and depraved revenge for purely imagined slights. He builds himself up as the pure avenger of wholly imagined wrongs, a fantasy paragon at odds with his anonymous, routine criminality. The criminal lashes out against the imaginary strictures that have landed him in jail in a chilling portrait of incoherent violence and the cost of fraying social ties. Like The Catcher in the Rye, The Room is thin on plot, but Selby penned a stunning character study, probing the fragile psyche of a born loser whose egomaniacal rage and incoherence are just as much of a prison as the bars that keep him locked up.
A representative passage:
Just twist it around and shove it up their asses, treading the floor of his cell, nodding his head with strong approval, shove it up and break it off. Those ugly mothers cunts. I dont need no fucking lawyer to make those cocksuckers look like idiots. When I get through I/ll fixem good. I/ll showem. The dumb sonsabitches. Krist, what a bunch of ignorant slobs Filthy, fucking slobs and they can shove people around just because they have a badge. Ignorant fucking okies who dont know their asses from a fucking hole in the ground and they get away with murder because they have that fucking uniform and a crew cut, the flattop bastards. The fucking flattop bastards. Drive around like theyre king shit. Drink coffee and eat donuts like they own the fucking joint. Looking down their noses at people. Who in the fuck do they think they are. Nothin but a bunch of ignorant slobs and they look down their noses at people. Jesus, what a pair of balls they have. What a fucking pair of balls, pounding across the floor, waving his hands, take away their guns and they aint shit. They aint worth a fiddlers fuck. I dont know who in the fuck they think they are, but I/ll be goddamned if theyre going to get away with it. I/ll showem. I/ll be a rotten sonofabitch if I dont showem.
J.R. Hayes’ head is a Selby-esque place, full of lurking horrors, crippling emotional vacancy and self-inflicted nightmares. Prowler in the Yard’s stalkerriffic story line could easily have been culled from Selby’s work. Transpose it into Selby’s idiosyncratic grammar and you could practically slide it into any number of the Brooklyn author’s works. Selby and Hayes both weave tales of impotent figures who can only take their rage out on imaginary targets, too passive and cowed to act out in life. They’re characters that have regressed into an inner fantasy land because real life has left them beaten and ignored. Both take you deep into the mind of a person you definitely don’t want to be, but, if you’re honest, can probably relate to more than is necessarily comfortable.
A representative song: “Junkyard God”
My knuckles are bleeding on your front door and these flowers are wilting in the rain. They were for you and now they are for no one. They are irrelevant as mercenaries in times of peace. They are smoke twisting off the lips of a movie star. Here is a boy with paper skin who longs to touch the girl of broken glass. She loves it when he wears his skin like that. In tatters.
The book: The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle might be the Murakmi-est of Marukami’s novels. It ticks off a list of several recurring motifs in his writing, including vanishing women, passive men, symbolic cats and sudden shifts into the realm of bizarre magic realism. There’s a bone-deep melancholy to the allegorical tale of an unwittingly unraveling marriage. But Murakami makes a fascinating choice to pair the intimate tale of two people falling out of love with a digression into the history of Japan’s atrocities in Manchuria during World War II, something the Japanese tend to gloss over. Early on, the protagonist meets an elderly veteran of Japan’s China campaign who recounts the horrors he’s witnessed committed by every nation involved, the horror of which still haunts him and erodes his confidence in his country and culture. Murakami pairs a couple whose breakdown in communication ruptures their marriage, thematically playing that off of Japan’s unwillingness to face to its own history of atrocities.
A representative passage:
Before long, the entire skin of Yamamoto’s right arm had come off in a single thin sheet. The skinner handed it to the man beside him, who held it open in his fingertips, circulating among the others to give them a good look. All the while, blood kept dripping from the skin. Then the officer turned to Yamamoto’s left arm, repeating the procedure. After that he skinned both legs, cut off the penis and testicles, and removed the ears. Then he skinned the head and the face and everything else. Yamamoto lost consciousness, regained it, and lost it again. The screams would stop whenever he passed out and continue when he came to again. But his voice gradually weakened and finally gave out altogether. All this time, the Russian officer drew meaningless patterns on the ground with the heel of his boot. The Mongolian soldiers watched the procedure in silence. Their faces remained expressionless, showing neither disgust nor excitement nor shock. They watched Yamamoto’s skin being removed a piece at a time with the same kind of faces we might have if we were out for a stroll and stopped to have a look at a construction site.
Florida’s recently reanimated Maruta take their name for the Japanese word for "log of wood," which was the derogatory term members of the infamous Unit 731 would use for the Chinese prisoners that they experimented on in ways that would appall Joseph Mengele. So that’s the obviously overlap. More importantly, I think, the concept suggested by the title Forward into Regression really captures something about the mindset of someone who is willing to commit the most horrific of atrocities all in the name of advancing their nation. There’s a point where violence becomes to repetitive that it becomes happenstance and that opens the doors to brutality like that committed by Unit 731, whose members never stood trial for their war crimes. The mental compartmentalization necessary to brutalize your fellow human beings while simultaneously sublimating your will to a leader you consider divine really shows the breadth of human insanity.
A representative song: “March Forward (Into Regression)”
Slave driver. Stand forth lead blind-fully, these chains of hope shall drag us with you. Drag us deep, into the ground, into the grave, into blissful obliteration. March without questions. Advance with no objection. Bound to your cables. Embodied entities in chain sequence. Move towards the ash, towards the crimson horizon. Mindless. Obedient. Devoted to follow. We march forward. Onward into regression.
Oh, MC Skat Kat, a weary nation desperately needs your wisdom.
A man cannot live on blastbeats alone, though merciful Kali knows I’ve damn well tried. But even I need the occasional break, and when I do I usually swing to the opposite extreme and dive into my sludge library. If grindcore is death metal’s punkier young cousin, the same can be said of sludge, which thumbs its nose at its more refined kin doom metal. I’ve pointed out the easy commerce between the two poles before, but it’s time to give the low and slow its due.
Both grind and sludge place a premium on extremity without belaboring the songwriting with a ton of wanking. Instead, the goal is to flatten you with brute force, an object lesson in victory through superior firepower. More than that, grind and sludge also share a jaundiced sensibility. Both trade in cynical broadsides against all that’s venal and corrupt, cataloging a litany of misery, mayhem and misanthropy.
If you haven’t taken the sludge plunge yet, here are a handful of bands and their up tempo counterparts that will get you stumbling your way through the fractured pavement of modern sludge’s moral and physical decay.
Punk and grind are hyped up music and it takes a lot to keep the adrenaline flowing to blast a beat and keep a mosh pit turning. It's something of an open secret that many of your favorite bands lean on the chemical crutch to keep them amped album after album and show after show. Despite Nancy Reagan's best efforts, drugs are just a part of the lifestyle. I'm referring, of course, to that black bitch, coffee.
Is it really any surprise that Hank Rollins would extol the virtues of the caffeinated life, especially when you realize that excessive coffee consumption is linked to aggression and irritability? Nobody was more aggressive or more irritable than Black Flag and they delivered many of their finest tirades with coffee cup in hand. And they take it black. None of that sugar or cream bullshit. Come to think of it, that's pretty much how they delivered their screeds: no sweeteners. The Young and the Restless
It's never too early to start a lifelong addiction and the smart ass punks Descendants were the '80s' best ambassadors of the caffeinated lifestyle. They advocate kids taking up the cause early and often. The Descendants' motto was "sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll minus the sex and drugs." Fortunately for us, caffeine slipped past their definition of drugs somehow because they have multiple excellent songs singing the joys of coffee. Thanks to modern chemistry, sleep is now optional. Kickass punk rock is mandatory.
Friends Without Benefits
Mocking coffee house culture during the mid-90s peak of Friends' inexplicable popularity is not exactly stretching your satiric muscles, but Operation: Cliff Clavin, who piggybacked on Propagandhi's wave of political skatecore, would like to express their displeasure with the ubiquity of pretentious assholes lounging around their favorite espresso bar with poetry in hand while trying to out-cool each other. Operation: Cliff Clavin were hating on hipsters before it was popular.
Playing Favorites
Sete Star Sept want you to know that this is how we sound when we don't get our vital caffeine. So fill the fucking cup, shut the fuck up, and the back the fuck away slowly.
Scoff they who lack the illumination to see the machinations behind the facade of the 21st Century. For those accustomed to piecing together disparate signs and portents, they elucidate the true powers that manipulate our lives like pawns. In place of bread and circuses our shadowy despots gave us pre-packaged rebellion and soporific entertainments meant to lull all who questioned the construct we call reality. While we feared their efforts to immanentize the eschaton, the Earth's true masters had discovered the ultimate transcendental armament: they had weaponized grindcore. Draw near and see the auguries revealed. Let's Play Operation
In 1961 the CIA attempted to infiltrate Singapore's secret police (hilarity ensued). The Southeast Asian nation decided to bide its time for nearly 50 years, retaliating in 2009 by enslaving the globe's gullible grind-loving children through a clever counter attack dubbed "Operation Grindcore." The vessel for this retaliatory strike was a three man commando team of subliminal musical specialists dubbed Wormrot. In less than 30 seconds, Singapore brought the right thinking grind world to its knees with its initial tactical strike.
Hash it Out
Singapore's unexpected surge for global domination was remarkably successful because first world grindcore audiences has been lulled into a pharmacological coma that left them helpless against Southeast Asia's most wicked riffs. Population Reduction lamented this indolence in their portrait of the strung out, incoherent grind masses with "Hash Smoking Grind Freaks." Befuddled by the rallying cry of "smoke, grind, sleep," Europe and North America had grown complacent, unprepared for the attack.
War is Hell... of a Good Time
The United States had actually gotten wind of Singapore's dastardly plans a few years in advance and attempted to develop appropriate counter measures. Fearing for the very survival of American grind, the nation's finest engineers (the good kind; not these assholes) gathered together along the Gulf Coast for the blastbeaten equivalent of the Manhattan Project. Because Wormrot's riffs buzzed like subliminal wasps, the United States' retaliation was known as Insect Warfare. Despite their best intentions, the researchers feared grindcore had been irrevocably infected with Wormrot's awesomeness. The only answer was to burn it all down. They declared they were "At War With Grindcore."
If You Build It, They Will Grind
What these scientists and assorted eggheads quickly realized is that no organic drummer could stand in the face of Fitri's insane thumping. From a dark corner of the DARPA budget government spooks are loath to even acknowledge exists came Agoraphobic Nosebleed and "Built to Grind," 22 seconds of digitized terminator noise that would stand as the United States' last hope. Some men are born to grind, others have grind thrust upon them, but motherfucking Agoraphobic Nosebleed were built to grind. Now go have sex with Jesus Christ, you faggot.
Sixth Extinction
The clandestine grindcore skirmish between Singapore and the United States eventually left the globe a charred cinder set upon by roving gangs of blastbeat bandits in jerry rigged cars and football pads. The last men standing at the end of the universe, Gripe said farewell to all that came before with their lamenting "Grind into Extinction." It's the end of the world as we know. Nobody feels fine now.
So the wife and I will be bringing a Lil Grinder home in a few weeks. If posting suddenly takes a nosedive, now you'll know why. We've been spending all our free time assembling baby furniture (I have a truly impressive collection of allen wrenches now), rearranging our finances and generally doing all that responsible first time parent shit. But there are more important, more pressing troubles now facing us that could potentially shatter our marriage and impede the kid's growth.
How do you talk to your kid about grindcore?
Should I go the chronological route? Start them off with Siege, work up through Scum? Will they react the same way I did or just roll their eyes at music that's decades old?
How about dive straight into the deep end with The Inalienable Dreamless? Or is that something you have to work up to?
Maybe I should ease them in with punk and then wean them over with stuff that vaguely resembles traditional song structure like Nasum or more recent Pig Destroyer (NOT Book Burner).
Can a kid be suspended for singing "Cheerleader Corpses" at the school talent show?
Do Insect Warfare make onesies?
These are the kinds of things I have to consider now. I'm responsible for a little person's all import musical development. This is a heavy responsibility. Otherwise my kid could grow up to get heartagram tattoos and listen to Disturbed like their uncle. Ewwwwwww. You only get one chance to raise kids right.
If anybody has good advice on making sure your kids grow up with good musical taste, I'm all ears.
I'm preparing as best I can. At least I know I'll have the most bad ass diaper bag in the daddy play group.
So I guess it's time to acknowledge that the universe is still here and my next mortgage payment and credit card bill are due. Thanks a fucking lot, Mayans. Way to let everyone down. So since we're still here (at least until Harold Camping carries a one in his calculations and gives doomsday another whirl), it's time to flip over another calendar and circle the important dates. Fortunately for you, I've annotated every every punk and grind moment of horological significance in 2013 for your convenience. There's a Hole in May Heart That Can Only Be Filled By... Me
"A child is influenced by the make believe," H.R. advised us on Bad Brains' "At the Movies." As any grown man in his mid-30s who considers his vintage Star Wars toy collection to be his retirement plan can aver, there's something about celluloid that sticks with you your whole life. That same kid smashing his Jedi and Sith action figures together after binging on a movie marathon will probably grow up to start a force-themed grindcore band (Sarlacc, I'm looking at you). There's something about the power of movies that stick with us and influence our perception of the universe and our place in it. So it's no surprise to find out that movies and grindcore are inextricably intertwined whether it's Graf Orlock's stolen lyrics or everybody sampling the same five or six songs. Some grinders take their love of film a step further, wearing their favorite movies on their sleeve so to speak. Here's to the bands that just straight up swiped their favorite films' names.
Horrified
Five fingering a movie name for your band is a tradition that is literally as old as grindcore itself. After Michigan's founding fathers of grind sensibly dropped the name Genocide, they went for the more subtle and more effective Repulsion. A pre-rape charge Roman Polanski broke down Catherine Deneuve in this 1965 psychological meltdown movie of the same name. Deneuve turned in a powerhouse performance as a repressed woman who completely cracks up over the course a single murderous afternoon. It's a film whose themes and body count had obvious appeal for the grindcore pioneers.
Paranoid Time
Grindcore has a fundamental distrust of governments and corporations and their unhealthy influence on wider society. Short-lived Michigan grinders (again with Michigan and stealing from movies!) The Parallax View were wont to scream about topics such as "Multi-National Death-Machines." So it's no surprise that the Warren Beaty film of the same name, about a shady corporation that specializes in political assassinations, resonated with their racket. Steeped in post-Watergate paranoia, the film was directed by Alan J. Pakula who also directed its real world counterpart All the President's Men.
I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK
Ryan Page is a man who loves his robots. He's gone to the cyborg well not once by twice with Robocop and Body Hammer. Both films deal with the nature of humanity as we stand on the cusp of a cybernetic evolutionary leap that may leave our biological shells redundant. Anybody who has sat down to ponder Page's Ballardian lyrical view knows those are themes right in his philosophical wheelhouse. But if he starts up a new project called Roy Batty, we may need to stage an intervention.
Adam and Eve and Eve and Eve
A film about a woman with multiple personality disorder seems like it would be a natural fit for the blastbeat treatment so it was a bit surprising that it was still sitting around unclaimed until Virginia band Three Faces of Eve, who many of you many know from the second This Comp Kills Fascists comp, snapped it up. Psychological disorders and frantic screaming just seem to make a perfect pairing.
SPF 100
Burnt by the Sun stole the name for a movie that was just as arty and angular as they were. The story follows a Soviet officer and war hero who gets caught up in a Stalinist purge. Everything he thought he knew about his country and his place in it come crashing around him over the course of a single summer day. Burnt by the Sun were a band steeped in humanist politics and the Oscar winning film pairs perfectly with those themes. It's a great example of a band's aesthetic and their inspiration coiling synergistically, creating a shared space between them.
Your mom or your local shampoo purveyor probably told you at some point during your impressionable youth that you never get a second chance to make a first impression. While your mom probably meant you shouldn't scratch your balls and spit on the floor during your job interview, it's also applicable to our own little grindcore realm.
As I become older and more crotchety (you damn kids stay off my blog's lawn!), I'm starting to lose patience with albums that take for-fuckin'-ever to really get ramped up. It seems like two out of three records these days start off with an overly long movie sample, a squall of feedback or a slow motion riff that explodes into blastbeats after a few seconds. There's nothing wrong with that per se, but unless you've dreamed up something as cool as Pig Destroyer's "Jennifer," it's probably best to just get straight to the blasting. That's why we're all here.
While I've tackled the ongoing blight of grind bands ending albums on slow songs, I want to be more positive with a tribute to those who know how to put their foot in the door straight away.
Pig Destroyer's first album in five years has routinely been the most anticipated grind record of the year for about the past three years as it continually kept getting pushed back and postponed. But when the band finally put Book Burner in our hands we were left with ... this. I've never before checked my watch in boredom waiting for a Pig Destroyer album to be over. Ever. That just happened with Book Burner. While I was certainly disappointed, I'm surprised at how quickly the consensus seems to have emerged that Book Burner kinda sucks. I'm just now emerging from my self-imposed media blackout on this (still haven't bothered to watch more than 5 seconds of that awful monkey video). So I've been cocooned for weeks so my impressions wouldn't be tainted by the conventional wisdom. But given the emotions I've invested in Pig Destroyer over the years, I'm still trying to discern exactly how the disappointment happened. I know that I don't like it, but I'm still trying to discern the why. So I'm opening the floor to theories both here and [shameless plug following] G&P's new Facebook page (where you can be subjected to even more grind-related ramblings that don't even rate blogging)[/shameless plug]. So it's time to play (psycho)pathologist...what went wrong and how does Pig Destroyer get themselves back on track? The floor is yours.
The cover song is a time honored tradition that probably dates back to the first couple of cavemen banging out a crazy beat on a log. Anyone who’s ever fretted a chord or thumped a drum has probably burned with the desire to emulate and pay tribute to their musical forefathers, casting themselves into the vicarious shoes of their heroes. If you’re reading this, there’s a pretty good chance that bands like Napalm Death, Discordance Axis and Phobia probably played a pretty significant role in your musical development. However, I don’t need hear yet another cover of the “The Kill.” There’s very little chance you’re going to top the original.
Maybe it's time for all of us to widen our horizons. Thinking about the ubiquity of covering certain bands led me to brainstorm a wish list of songs outside the grind realm that I’d absolutely love to hear get blastbeaten and the band I think is the best candidate for the job. Here are my top 10 dream parings:
Political maestro James Carville shepherded Bill Clinton to two terms of balanced budgets and relative world peace with his simple insight that in a post-Cold War world it was the economy that would be the electorate's overriding concern. Just to make sure campaign staffers stayed on message, Carville posted a note on the office wall: "It's the economy, stupid."
Tapping in to its punk and hardcore roots, grindcore is preoccupied by social and political topics. While it does its best to spit bile in the direction of religion, politics and other easily identifiable villains, grindcore does not do a good job of addressing thornier, more complicated issues like the economy. Granted, there's only so much you can say in 75 seconds, but it's a topic -- especially in the depth of the worst global downturn since the Great depression -- that's ripe for some angry discussion. Here are four artists who keep their mind on their money and their money on their mind.
Tools of the (Free) Trade
No other band has ever been as attuned to the economic unease of modern blue collar workers as Benumb. Where other grind bands were content to choke out vague denunciations of The System and how it needs to be Taken Down, Benumb penned factory floor ditties about offshored jobs, disappointing unions and lives spent paycheck to paycheck with none of Bruce Springsteen's bullshit romanticism. One of the best examples is Withering Strands of Hope's "WTO: Disintergration of the Working Class," which detailed the aftershocks of the Clinton administration's obsession with international free trade deals. The treaties that ultimately tied the world together more tightly economically came at the expense of blue collar wage earners.
Exhume to Consume
Anyone who has ever had the pleasure of chatting up Kill the Client's Champ Morgan will tell you that dude is not shy about sharing his libertarian outlook on life. The guy's caustic outlook on life is perfect for a "pox on both their houses" approach to America's useless, bifurcated political landscape. And like every true Ron Paualite I've ever met, Morgan is also attuned to the modern economic landscape. Cleptocracy's "Consumption is Intoxication" could have been just another "buying shit is evil" song. What elevates the tune is that Morgan zeros in on the debt and funding mechanisms that make our consumption-driven existence possible. It's that extra perceptive step that makes Kill the Client such a force.
Occupy Everywhere
Matthew Widener's impending revolution will begin at the banks. The rabble rousing Liberteer ringleader can be found philosophically camped outside of Wall Street's rapacious halls. The avowed 99 Percenter has been pretty clear about his social/economic philosophy. So it's no surprise that a song like "Usurious Epitaph" takes on the economic chains that bind us. That loan you took out to get ahead in life ultimately only holds you back, Liberteer says. A lifetime of scrimping and saving and living paycheck to credit card only to be wiped out in a catastrophic economic collapse would make even the most mild mannered middle class consumer into a frothing Marxist revolutionary.
Candy Land
Harry McClintock's "Big Rock Candy Mountain" may just sound like a goofy Candy Land tune about a pancreas-crushing paradise of diabetic delights. But if you pay closer attention to the lyrics and put the song into its proper context, suddenly it becomes a snapshot of the economic instability that led up to the Great Depression. In the hands of The Oily Menace, the song also takes on a fierce new urgency, getting a 21st Century update for a new era of bankruptcy, both moral and monetary.
Have you ever had this experience? You're rocking out to a killer punk song and then you start to catch the lyrics and you shudder because they're full of the most ignorant garbage imaginable. Suddenly, what was once a great musical moment becomes tainted. My first experience with punk was finding a group of open minded people who were inclusive and cool. That's colored my expectation of what punk should be my whole life. So it disturbs me when otherwise intelligent bands writing songs that seem primed to insult large chunks of their audience. I've mentioned before I'm the kind of person who has a hard time separating my music and my politics, especially when the lyrics are insulting large chunks of your audience. I have a really hard time getting back into a song once the ignorant lyrics come to light. Here's what happens when three respected bands lose their fucking minds for a minute.
Slip Up
What makes this doubly frustrating is, from a musical standpoint, "Slip it In" is a fucking great song. Black Flag never sounded better than they did on the album Slip it In and the title track is one of the best of an overwhelmingly strong lot of songs (minus "Rat's Eyes" ewww). The band was tight and taking stolid, stale punk into new and incredibly exciting places. However, it starts with one of the most ignorant songs ever penned by a revered punk band with "Slip it In." Black Flag is better than this. The sexual politics of this one are particularly noxious. Just because she says she "don't want it," that doesn't mean you can't fuck her any way, amirite guys? Even though the young lady in question tells us she "kinda [has] a boyfriend" and Hank opines she's "had too much to drink," he still fucks her. Ladies and gentlemen, that's called rape. And even though our narrator is whining and cajoling the girl to have sex with him, he still accuses her of being "loose" and a "whore." The rancid cherry on top of the shit sundae is the pathetically sexualized video that trades in just about every obnoxious jailbait stereotype you can name. If it's meant to be satire, it's failing spectacularly. And I can already here the excuses: blah blah blah Kira Roessler played bass (and she kicked ass) blah blah blah a woman helped sing the song blah blah blah they tackled the obnoxiousness of the aggressive male libido next album with "Loose Nut." Doesn't change anything for me. It still comes off as obnoxious slut shaming and Black Flag should be better than that. Mount up? More like fuck off.
White Whine
As far as I'm concerned, those preachy, self righteous fucks in Minor Threat have exactly one good song and that's "Filler." Maybe they would have had more if they hadn't spent the otherwise rocking "Guilty of Being White" spewing self-pitying whiny garbage. Oh noes! A minority was unjustifiably mean to me. My hurt feelings are just as bad as 500 years of slavery and systematic cultural oppression. Oh wait, no they're not. I got news for you, cupcake, some members of minority groups can be assholes. That's not because they're minorities. It's because they're assholes. That doesn't excuse them being a dick, but, dude, let it fucking go. So even if some random black person tried to make you feel bad for being white and unfairly accused you of being complicit in slavery, their assholism doesn't mean to you doesn't mean you get to run around shouting "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!" Because, at the end of the day, you're still going through life on the lowest difficulty setting. To be honest, I've never been quite fucking sure what exactly Black Flag was trying to get at with "White Minority," even after hours staring at the lyric sheet. If it's satire, it's not coming through and let's all agree that any song that screams "white pride" during the chorus without any palpable sense of sarcasm or irony is open to bad interpretations.
Blow Me Down
Speaking of minorities who stand convicted of assholism: Bad Brains seemed to have scrubbed all the videos of the infamous "Don't Blow No Bubbles" from the internet, so take a moment, if you will, to peruse frontman H.R.'s less than enlightened thoughts on the '80s AIDS crisis and homosexuality. Let's just say he briefly lost his PMA.
Don't blow no bubbles Don't blow no troubles
In time before there was no cure Now through his will it's healed for sure (TRASH PITS, TRASH PITS, TRASH PITS) Away! It's not the weather, we've got P.M.A.
We know you can do anything And no thought withheld from thee So here I beseech thee To always request and declare
Don't blow no bubbles Don't blow no troubles There's got to be a better way Don't blow no spikes Ask Jah and he'll make the change
We know you can do anything And no thought withheld from thee So here I beseech thee To always request and declare
We know you can do anything And no thought withheld from thee So here I beseech thee To always request and declare
Don't blow no bubbles (and we can stop the AIDS) Don't blow no spikes Don't blow no fudge buns Ask Jah and he'll make the change
We know you can do anything And no thought withheld from thee So here I and I said to thee To always request and declare
As you can imagine, that didn't go over so well with gay-positive contemporaries like MDC, the Big Boys and the Dicks and caused a huge rift between those bands. It's a real shame because, like "Slip It In," it's, musically, a very interesting song. With the album Quickness the Bad Brains were getting more metallic and experimental. They were taking their hardcore into new and more adept directions. Basically, everything Living Colour got praised for the Bad Brains did better. It's just a shame they wedded that open minded musicality to some of the most bigoted ignorance spewed this side of a Nazi skins show. However, the band has grown since then and bassist Darryl Jennifer copped to his bigotry and apologized in a recent interview [thanks, Bill, for the heads up on this one]: " You’ve got to understand that I’m a young man growing, getting into something. Now I’m 46 years old and I’ve learned that that’s ignorant. I’ve learned through the years that we’re all God’s children, regardless of your race, creed, color, sexuality, any of that."
Grindcore is hit and run music. Its strength comes from an unrelenting campaign of musical shock and awe, dispensing with songwriting conventions like verses, choruses and all that other assorted folderol to boil tunes down to their atavistic core. And then it pummels you with a dozen songs in a row, often with no pause between to catch your breath. It's that synergistic adrenaline rush that gives the style its power. So why do so many bands muck it all up by ending albums with drawn out slow songs? What is this inexplicable compulsion to tack on an unnecessary slow song at the end? It doesn't have to be this way. Discordance Axis made "A Leaden Stride to Nowhere" the penultimate song on masterpiece The Inalienable Dreamless, stabbing you in the earholes with the brutalizing "Drowned" as you limp off spent and bloody. Nasum probably wrote the single greatest slow song ever penned by a grind band with the poignant "The Final Sleep" on Helvete, but they recognized the power of what they had in the tune and stuck it in the middle rather than relegating it to the end. I've mentioned bands throwing unexpected bits of musical failure at the end of albums before, but this ending on a doom song thing is so pervasive to have become a cliche. How did we get to this place, you ask? Here's a quick jog down memory lane.
Don't Fear the Reaper
Probably the first instance of the phenomenon can be traced to arguably the first ever grind album, Siege's 1984 demo Drop Dead. The length and contents have Drop Dead have shifted and grown over the years as bonus tracks have been added and deleted, but one constant remains: it always ends on the seven minute sax-laden freakout that is "Grim Reaper." The band took the training wheels of fast hardcore and set it on the path of the one true grind, but they also inadvertently established the ending on a doom song cliche as well.
Cursed to Crawl
As with any good grindcore cliche, of course Napalm Death has to factor into the script. Though they set into stone what Siege had pressed into clay, Napalm Death took their time to leave their mark on this one. In fact, the Side A Scum lineup went to the opposite extreme, closing out their half of the album with the two second bliss of "You Suffer." No, it wasn't until 1988's From Enslavement to Obliteration that Napalm Death caught the slow song bug, capping off the album with three minutes of fake Swans plod in the form of "The Curse," which served to bookend the album with slow motion starter "Evolved as One."
Another dozen albums and a whole new lineup later, Napalm Death are still pulling this trick out on occasion. In fact, for The Code is Red...Long Live the Code in 2005 Napalm Death pulled the double whammy, closing out with a pair of slow songs (and again shamelessly stealing from Swans) in the shape of "Morale" and "Our Pain is Their Power."
Semper Grind Fidelis
The stylistic tick didn't take long to embed itself in the second wave of grindcore royalty either. Brutal Truth have never had a problem mixing and matching styles and tempos, but they never really fell under the spell of the last song doom phenomenon until 2009's comeback album Evolution Through Revolution and its end piece, the decidedly non-grinding "Grind Fidelity."
Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid
While I keep saying Phobia's 1998 album Means of Existence is my favorite album of their extensive catalog, the longer I keep writing about it, the more I keep picking up on irritating little quirks. Like the seven minutes of stumbling doom slumber that are album finisher "Ruined." Obviously, I need to stop thinking critically about this record before I ruin it for myself. However, this does help put drummer John Haddad's later jump to doomsters Eyes of Fire into perspective.
In fact, Phobia pulled the exact same stunt three years later on follow up full length Serenity Through Pain. This time they kept last song "Sovereign" to a more concise four minutes of ambient drone and spoken word mumbling.
Go, Go Gadget
If there's a formula to Gadget albums, it would be this: slam listeners in the face with a crazy intense song off the bat and then chill it all out at the end with a slow song. It's a remarkably potent formula that's apparently served them very well because they've done it twice now. Starting with 2004's Remote, Gadget said fare thee well with the rolling bit of ambient unease that was "Tema: Skit."
They clearly thought the formula worked because they did it again at the end of 2006's The Funeral March. Once again the plodding dirge of " Tingens Föbannelse" calmed everyone out on their way out the door. Unfortunately, this one's not available on YouTube and SoundCloud won't let me upload it. So you'll just have to take my word for it on this one.
Mess With Texas
Kill the Client have a well deserved reputation as unrelenting grind maniacs, but they've also succumbed to the seductive allure of getting all down in the dumps at the end of an album. For 2005's Escalation of Hostility, the Texas chainsaw massacre crew departed from their frothing mouthed style to slow everything down like a sizzling, lethargic Texas panhandle summer on "Negative One." Interestingly, they've not gone back to that move since their first full length. The subsequent two long players have been all grind all the time instead and are probably the better for it.
Rotten to the Core
Rotten Sound are fond of shoving the longest song on the album to the end, but they usually kept it grinding. They never went for the full slow song closer until 2008's Cycles. Five albums in, that's when the Finns decided to mix the formula up a tad and get their doom and gloom on with the four minute plod that is "Trust." This is not what Rotten Sound are known for or what they really do best, but if they keep it to one album out of every five, I'll let it slide.
You Suffer...But Why?
I'm going to say it. It needs to be said. If you're in a grind band, your strength is probably in writing great grind songs. Doom is not your thing because otherwise you'd be in a doom band. Case in point, Suffering Mind's "Ostateczny Pogrzeb," which puts paid to At War With Mankind. Now Suffering Mind are an excellent grind band and you won't catch me disparaging their way with a blastbeat, but "Ostateczny Pogrzeb" finds one slow motion riff, rides it to death and then takes it out back and pokes with a stick for a couple extra minutes just to be sure. In a shorter, tighter incarnation, I wouldn't have a problem with it. However, I think as is it ultimately deflates the end of At War With Mankind a tad.
Blasphemy Made Flesh
Baltimore's Triac actually pulled off one the better slow song finales on short album Blue Room. The band's signature brew of blasting grind and scrungy power violence came to a nicely fermented hardcore head on last song "My First Blasphemy." Unlike a lot of other grind bands, Triac actually have a way with a slow song that doesn't completely negate the preceding album experience. Ending on a slow song may be a tired cliche, but I wouldn't be as irritated by it if more songs were this good.
Bloody Hell
The slow final song shows no signs of fading into grindcore history, either. Bloody Phoenix got into the act in 2010. The title track of album Death to Everyone, which opened with a rip on Neurosis, closed out with three minutes of slow rolling drums and jabbering about god being dead. Band mainstay Jerry Flores has been kicking around grindcore for 20 years, but as far as I know, this is the first time he's resorted to this particular genre trope.
The Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil
So after all that bitching, I don't want to leave you with the impression that I'm opposed to ending on a slow song entirely. In fact, quite the opposite. Done well, a good slow song at the end lets an album's ideas simmer in the brain, slowly seeping through your cortex to embed themselves in the stuff of your nightmares. Tusk very effectively pulled off that move at the end of 2004 masterwork The Tree of No Return with not one but two slow doom songs at the end. It works largely because the band's cross breeding of Pig Destroyer and Neurosis give them the musical palette to explore wider vistas and the EP's central narrative -- a man gets lost in the wilderness, goes crazy from hunger and thirst and is subsequently eaten by bears -- demands a musical arc that bends from initial grindcore panic to doom metal delirium. So Tusk left us with the twin desolation that was "Starvation Dementia" and "Ursus Arctos -- Walk the Valley." This is how you do ending on a slow song properly.
