Glass Half Empty: Pessimiser's Legacy Lives Miserably Ever After

 

In retrospect, Pessimiser/Theologian Records was probably doomed to an early grave by virtue of the collective weight of addiction and bad choices embodied by its roster of toe-stubbing glumsters. While most famous for the incredibly awesome collection of Cry Now, Cry Later compilations, owner Chris Elder, also of Despise You, collected a cross-genre stable of uniquely miserable fucks who bled out their sins for our audio pleasure. Unlike a label like Willowtip, which traces its origin to a small cadre of like minded tech-death/grinders, Pessimiser was all over the genre map. Its constituents were united less by sonic similarities than they were by dismal outlook. Whether you cried now or cried later, the goal was to burrow deep into those shadowed recesses where the worst aspects of your soul rot, a polluted parade of junkie odes, misanthropic memories and downer days.

You Grind…But Why?: Jerry Flores

Some men are born to grind. Some pursue grind. Others have grind thrust upon them. That's pretty much the tale of Excruciating Terror and Bloody Phoenix guitarist Jerry Flores.
Excruciating Terror was one of those transitional artists in my life. Along with Phobia, they represented my first forays into grind beyond the obligatory Napalm Death/Carcass axis. Divided We Fall helped plunge me down the rabbit hole of grindcore, sparking a lifetime addiction. After Excruciating Terror’s dissolution, guitarist Flores kept the grind coming with current outfit Bloody Phoenix.
When I ask Flores why he chose the path of blast beats, his answer is just a pithy and concise as his songwriting.

“I didn't choose grindcore,” he said. “What I was playing was considered grindcore once the term was coined. I just had a need for speed growing up listening to music. Always seeking faster music. You just end up playing what you like.”

Holy Terror!

I’m sure you’re all familiar with the five stages of grief. Every huckster, two-bit pop psychologist on the tube is bound to break them out when “diagnosing” some bored, fat haus-frau’s malaise on any number of woo-spewing day time talk shows of the Oprah ilk. But friends, were you aware that there are six stages of grindcore terror? Probably not. But if I’m ever going to make Deepak Chopra-style cash peddling absolute bullshit, I need to get this concept out in the public consciousness. So all of you grab a box of tissues and your teddy bear because we’re going to talk about your feelings.

The first step toward curing your terror-related problem, naturally, is to admit you have a problem. You must admit to your Terrorism, as it were, before you can put yourself back on the path of healing and emotional well being. Terrorism has been known to cause manic behavior such as circlepitting your living room, grasping at citrus no one else can see and breaking out in wordless, animalistic roars that scare pets and small children. All of this is perfectly natural, of course, but you must admit that your Terrorism exists and that it is a problem for any sort of treatment to be successful.

Having admitted to your Terrorism, the second stage of therapy will seek to identify the locus of your terror, the agent acting upon you or Terrorizer. Common fears include heights, kissing grandma, spiders, Tim Curry in It or, often, three Hispanic dudes from Los Angeles and their affirmative action gringo friend grinding your fucking face to a bloody milkshake with one of the greatest albums ever recorded. Who knows what yours might be. These things tend to vary. Pick yours and I’ll proceed to beat it out of you.

The most difficult fears to diagnose are those that lack grounding in concrete reality – an Unseen Terror in professional parlance – because they are often a result of a shock to the psychological system. Like the day you found out that fat, balding guy from Napalm Death used to be a fucking great drummer or further realizing that somebody actually went to the trouble of writing grind songs about Garfield. However, don’t make the Human Error of thinking just because your fear can’t be seen that it can’t be treated.

Now that we’ve identified the source of your terror, we must evaluate its impact on your life to devise an appropriate treatment program. A mild Phobia can generally be effectively managed with a regimen of waterboarding and electric shocks to the genitalia from a car battery. But if you suffer from a more Excruciating Terror we may have to get more … creative … in our therapy choices. Say, a melon baller, the audiobook of Atlas Shrugged and a tube of tennis balls. I’ll let you work that out for yourself.

Should more conventional methods of addressing your terror prove ineffective, we can of course step you up to the Extreme Noise Terror protocol. The protocol often involves gathering a couple hundred unsmiling young white men in black shirts in a dank, stinky hole that pretends to be a club and subjecting them to tinnitus-inducing levels of screeching, shrieking noise you have somehow convinced them constitutes music while simultaneously gouging them on food and beer prices. Who said being a humanitarian can’t be profitable? Fun fact: Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s fear of air travel was cured by a 72-hour, 300 decibel session of Britney Spears’ greatest hits at our Guantanamo Bay treatment facility. The regimen was not a total success, however. While his fear of flying had been addressed, he also developed a crippling phobia of whorish, washed up teen pop stars. Not that I blame him.

Should we be successful, the terror treatment program should leave you in a state Beyond Terror Beyond Grace. While you’ll likely have overcome your fears (possibly substituting a slew of new phobias in the process, say of sadistic therapists), you’ll also place yourself beyond your chosen deity’s grace and redemption given the treatment often results in patients screaming blasphemies and obscenities throughout (again: melon baller, Ayn Rand, tennis balls). While you’ve likely sacrificed your immortal soul in the process (should you ascribe to such a quaint notion), I guarantee the Andrew Childers treatment process will mean your original fear will be the furthest thing from your mind.

Max Ward Beyond Thunderdome: Hardcore Road Warrior Refuses to Be One More Capitalist Casualty

In the annals of hardcore over the last couple of decades, Max Ward has been there, done that and pressed it on a limited edition 7” split. And if you listen, dude will break down the free market forces that went into making that record.
Though Ward, a.k.a. Hirax Max, a.k.a. Battle Axe Max, has hung up his drum sticks after an accomplished career spent anchoring the likes of Plutocracy, Spazz and Capitalist Casualties, the guy is still giving his all to music as the man behind the consistently awesome 625 Thrash records. Almost 20 years later, the guy still gets off on a good blast beat when he’s not busting his ass in graduate school applying Marxist dialectics to interwar Japan.
With power violence (Ward prefers the term fastcore) enjoying a well-earned renaissance as grinders and hardcore kids who grew up on California’s unique punk twist in the 1990s putting a new spin on an old style, I thought I’d hit up Ward to rehash his salad days as a fixture on the scene and get an update on the latest with 625.What I got instead was an amazingly detailed conversation about the socio-economic state of the world as it trudges toward globalization and how punk has just become one more mall commodity from one of its more insightful practioners.
“Max is one guy I have nothing negative to say about. If you know me, that's very rare,” said Bloody Phoenix guitarist Jerry Flores. “He's a good guy.”
Flores first met Ward when the guitarist was fronting L.A. grinders Excruciating Terror, finding themselves on bills with Spazz and Plutocracy. And when Flores went hunting for a label to back his newest band, he turned to Ward.
“Max has been around,” Flores said. “I'm sure he's had plenty of both positive and negative experiences dealing with different people over the years. I'm sure he's got a pretty good sense of what is fair. Probably a partial reason as to why he started his label.”
But, ya see, Ward never set out to be the P. Diddy of hardcore and grind. He just needed a place to put out records that jazzed him and the guy comes off as downright conflicted about turning music into a consumer product.
“Yeah, music and industry do not belong together, whether that is the home-screen printing bootlegger selling shirts on eBay or the ‘DIY’ label like mine,” Ward said. “I think the minute you start worrying about recovering your expenses on a release than it’s all lost. Music needs to be an experience rather than a commodity, but you can’t really tour and create that experience if you don’t have commodities to sell for food and gas. But yeah, I got really down on the scene by running a label. It’s a fucking disgusting business, even at the small level that I am.”
With the benefit of a decade of hindsight we tend to think of the first wave of power violence and Bay Area hardcore bands now as institutions, demigods who unleashed a fitful racket that immediately changed the course of music as we know it. The truth, natch, is a bit more complicated. We tend to forget that those bands played their share of half empty basement shows and struggled to get a 7 inch pressed. DIY wasn’t necessarily just a political statement; it was a matter of necessity if the aspiring musicians were serious about what they were doing.
“I started putting records out cuz no one would touch Plutocracy, so I released, or help release, the first few EPs,” Ward said. “Later, I wanted to get ETO and No Less out so I started 625 to do that. It just kinda took off from there. I wanted to release bands form the local scene, so I would take 625 records out on tour with me and try to get people turned on to the smaller bands back home, bands that I thought were much bigger than most of the ‘big’ bands that I was in at the time.”
Listen to any band bitch long enough and they’ll whistle you a few bars of the “label done me wrong” blues, but you don’t here that from musicians who’ve partnered with Ward to put out albums.
“Max rules,” Insect Warfare guitarist Beau Beasley said. “He’s one of the only guys I truly trust to release our music. He is incredibly honest and he actually likes a lot of the same bands I do. Also, he picks up his phone and is very considerate of the bands he works with. Money and making it big or definitely not on his agenda. I’ve known Max for a while and I sent him the first IW demo and he wanted to release it. My response was ‘of course.’ I cant think of anyone else I’d want to release our stuff. Dude is legit. Not a piece of shit like all these other jackasses.”
But releasing records by some of the leading lights in modern American grind is just one notch in Ward’s belt.
From the rather prosaic confines of California’s power violence scene in the ‘90s, Ward has turned hardcore ambassador to the world; 625’s signature accomplishment seems to be culling the best hard core has to offer from across the globe. His specialty, in particular, seems to be snagging acts from scenes in burgeoning third world countries (look out for a comp dedicated to South East Asian hardcore later this year) that would never ordinarily get play here in America. That the bands come from countries and regions that have experienced genuine political and cultural repression may not be a coincidence either.
“I mean, I think its rad to be able to check out bands from Indonesia, Singapore, Serbia, Macedonia, even Africa now that all play fastcore, but the same imperialism exists within the scene that ‘globalization’ in general has reproduced.” Ward said. “… I think the geopolitics of the 1980s made things more pressing, so you had European bands singing about NATO, you had Eastern European bands sneaking tapes out of the country to get pressed. Now it’s just Rupert Murdoch’s MySpace and all-over print longsleeves on eBay. … I think the records that I’m proudest of are the EPs like Domestik Doktrin (Indonesia) and Secret 7 (Singapore), or LPs like I Shot Cyrus and Discarga (both Brazil) that would not have happened unless I did it. I think so many people are clamoring to do the next Career Suicide record they lose site that there is a whole world out there - one that would be richer and more diverse if we stopped pandering to bands that played ‘American ’82 HC’ style.”

Toca rapido o muerte: A Look Back at Grind’s Latin Explosion

Pete Sandoval didn’t even know what to call the racket he was kicking out on his first drum set in 1984 in Los Angeles.

Two decades on, Terrorizer is synonymous with grindcore, but the "Grind/core/Death/Speed/metal" noise they banged out didn’t even have a name when Sandoval unseated a drummer named Fishe to cement the band’s lineup.
“Finally I could do what I wanted to in a pure Grindeathcore guitar hellstorm! I loved it!” said Commando, who had been playing in a band called Merciless Death Squad at the time.
And while no list of the greatest drummers in metal could overlook the Terrorizer/Morbid Angel skinsman, Sandoval and a small coterie of L.A. bands during grind’s formative years can also be credited with breaking metal’s cultural line.
As uptight crypto-racist demagogues are calling for the roundup and deportation of anybody with more melanin than an Irish albino – regardless of legal status – it’s important to remember how Hispanic musicians helped birth grind. A full 15 years before MTV afflicted us with Ricky Martin, grind had its own Latin explosion going on.
Metal as a whole was just coming into its international own in the mid-80s, but aside from Suicidal Tendencies’ revolving door and the Spanish speaking half of Slayer, it was still very much a middle class high school white guy scene in America.
“Well, I guess most white guys were interested in heavy metal and glam rock while on the other hand the Hispanic musicians were busy writing sick stuff and having gigs anywhere they could,” Sandoval said.
“East L.A. was full of Hispanics before I moved to Tampa in 1988. There were tons of bands from that area and it meant that most bands were made of mostly Latinos and a few white guys that joined the extreme metal scene. I could mention to you bands like Sadistic Intent, Darkness (all Latinos), Terrorizer (all Latinos), F.C.D.N. Tormentor (all Latinos). I mean, I could mention to you at least 15 bands which are formed mostly by Latinos!”
That list would also include Excruciating Terror, Resistant Culture (known as Resistant Militia then) and the mighty Nausea, featuring Terrorizer throat Oscar Garcia.
It seems inevitable L.A.’s racial cauldron would open metal’s narrow doors to new viewpoints and cultural experiences.
“We have a little bit of everything here, a microcosm of the world,” Excruciating Terror guitarist Jerry “Roadkill” Flores said. “We have people here from every part of the world here. It is very segregated though. By government design of coarse. Just like any major city, the government creates ethnic ghettos. The segregation is residential. People do of course interact. It would be impossible not to.”
It was in that “ethnic ghetto” Flores met Martin Alvaro and Victor Garcia, the other two thirds of E.T.’s lineup, which even briefly included a young Dino Cesares of Fear Factory/Brujeria fame.
“We all went to the same schools and are from the same area, North East LA,” said Flores, who is still active with a new band, Bloody Phoenix. “We all lived about 3 miles from each other. I had known most since junior high. Looking back now, it's clear we all had different plans/goals. Speaking only for myself, from day one I just wanted to make music, record it, travel with people I could have fun with and meet all my pen-pals that I had had since I was about 13.”
Grindcore’s hybrid nature also forced upstart bands to mix up their social circles, which helped broaden its appeal and introduce new voices. There was no grind “scene” in L.A., Sandoval and Flores agree. Rather mid-80s grinders, who didn’t really know what to call their hellacious racket, were forced to carve out space on punk and metal bills to get their music heard.
“L.A. has had a steady influx of grind bands since the mid ‘80s. Most of those early bands didn't know what they were playing would eventually be called grindcore,” Flores said. “But at no time during that time would I honestly be able to tell you that there was a huge grindcore scene in L.A. Grindcore bands usually played death metal shows. It was weird. Too punk for metal, too metal for the punks. During that time it was much easier to get on a metal show than a punk show though. A lot of punks, not all, were elitist snobs who wanted nothing to do with us.”
So what are we to take from this little stroll through grind history? Latinos, like all other blast beat junkies, were just looking for an outlet for all the frustrations, petty and cosmic, that come with being part of the human species.
“Maybe it's the purity of it,” Flores said. “It's simplicity. It's intensity. It's anger. Things people from any background can feel and understand. Maybe it's the fact that in grind you don't hear about dragons or about how much money you have or how many women you've abused or Satan. Grind is honest and humble.”
We broach the possibility this whole exercise is just recursive post modern bullshit with Flores and he happily agrees.
“I am Latino,” he said. “I identify with Latinos, obviously. But I consider myself human before anything else. We are all one race, human. By breaking us down into groups you divide us. Division is our downfall as a race.”

Viva la Revolucion: Five Mandatory Latino Grind Albums

Terrorizer
World Downfall
Earache
1989
We’ve already deemed this the seventh greatest grind album of all time, so not too much more needs to be said.
World Downfall is a blistering tour de force of straight forward punk guitar over blast beat goodness. Almost as famous for the band members’ subsequent bands, Terrorizer were not only L.A.’s premiere grinders, but America’s best entry into the blast beat sweepstakes during the 1980s as well.
Terrorizer’s influence is undeniable. You can hear World Downfall’s influence in every straight forward, grimy grind band that came after them.

Nausea
Crime Against Humanity
Wild Rags
1991
After Terrorizer posthumously recorded World Downfall, frontman Oscar Garcia leaped into his new project. Rounding up members of Majesty and other local bands, Nausea crossed up proto-grind with bits of crust and a few industrial flourishes to firmly establish Garcia was not about to rest on his Terrorizer laurels. Though Crime Against Humanity is the band’s only full length to date, Garcia and Co. remain active, periodically playing along side like minded bangers such as Venomous Concept and Phobia.

Resistant Culture
Welcome to Reality
S.O.S. Records
2005
The first album G&P set its hand to reviewing. After a not so amicable parting of the ways with Napalm Death, guitarist Jesse Pintado hooked up with this all Latino ensemble, formerly known as Resistant Militia and featuring Tony Rezhawk, who would stand in for Oscar Garcia when Pintado reunited Terrorizer just before his untimely death. While Darker Days Ahead failed to revive Terrorizer’s glory days, Welcome to Reality is a stunning bit of forward looking metal noise, mixing prime grind with native chants and rhythms to create a startling original sound. The band’s lyrical concepts and political stances on the behalf of America’s marginalized native peoples are also refreshing.
If your ancestors sold small box infected blankets to indigenous peoples, Resistant Culture would like to have a word with you.

Excruciating Terror
Divided We Fall
Pessimiser
1997
Other than Phobia, no other first wave grind band was nearly as crusty and punked out as Excruciating Terror. This trio blasted out bass-heavy, primal thumpings that could peel the siding off your house from a couple blocks over.
Though they only recorded a couple of albums during their brief lifespan, Excruciating Terror went out on a high note with 1997’s Divided We Fall, a pissed off diatribe about the world’s many failings spread over 21 60-second outbursts. This is a band that has never gotten the proper credit for their place in grindcore’s annals, and Divided We Fall is an excellent place to get acquainted with one of the scene’s elder statesmen.

Bloody Phoenix
War, Hate and Misery
625 Thrash
2007
After Excruciating Terror fizzled, guitarist Jerry Flores roared right back with another largely-Latino ensemble that whips out snarling, stabbing bursts of grindcore bliss.
Picking up where his last band left off, Flores and his team are setting the bar even higher with a new batch of songs that easily rival the genre’s forerunners.
We’re all for seeing grind mutate and explore new possibilities, but it’s also nice to see someone keeping the home fires of the old school burning.