Lifetime of Gray Skies Part 6: Into the Outer Dark

Too far I want
Too much I fell
From grace disappear
I wish I knew why it
Felt like ice picks

"Lucky Sky Diamond"
The Outer Dark

    After eight years and three full lengths, the members of Anodyne went their separate ways after they failed to find an audience for their idiosyncratic take on hardcore and noise rock. Nearly every record label the band worked with has since gone out of business, leaving the bulk of the band's material out of print and minimizing their shot at posthumous underground glory.
    "Anodyne was an obscure band," guitarist and vocalist Mike Hill said. There was only really a few people who remember the band. We weren't like Coalesce who were selling out huge places and selling huge records. Re-releasing things by them makes sense. Us, you'd get my mom and two friends, maybe. I wouldn't even sell a copy to my mom. I'd give it to her."
    But Anodyne's legacy lives as its DNA filtered down through the various musicians' new projects. Anodyne alumni have taken stabs at grindcore, shoegaze, sludge, indie rock and electronic music in the years since they crawled out from under a Lifetime of Gray Skies.

One EP Wonders

Some bands don't even get the benefit of a single full length to make their mark on grindcore. Instead, they have to prove their chops in the space of a single EP. The time constraints inherent in the format seem perfectly suited to melting out the fat, forcing bands to focus on their finest, strongest material. If your band's 7-inch drags in spots, you've got bigger problems. But the bands below needed nothing more than that to stake their claim to grindcore glory.

Siege
Drop Dead
Deranged (Re-release)
1984
Siege only had nine songs and 16 minutes of material to their credit (and half of that was the saxophone-heavy freak out of "Grim Reaper") but that's all the Boston band needed to lay the cornerstone of what would become grindcore. Siege pushed the tempos of hardcore to nigh-blastbeat territory on Drop Dead and their flailing brand of thrashed out punk is an undeniable influence on Napalm Death's Scum, side A in particular. Everything that would later be associated with grindcore can be spotted on Drop Dead: thrashing drums, tonsil-scraping screaming and punk on speed guitars. Unfortunately, the band would drop dead shortly after recording their demo, but the legacy was just getting started.

Luddite Clone
The Arsonist and the Architect
Relapse/Cyberdine 243
2000
Coming out of the same New Jersey scene that brought us Human Remains and Burnt by the Sun, Luddite Clone played a shifty brand of hardcore, grind and metal on EP The Arsonist and the Architect. The band's collected works would include a split with Burnt by the Sun and a live split with the hardcore band The Esoteric, but it was their solo six song EP that made their reputation as a tech savvy band with a penchant for ear virus riffs and jazz complexity. Even though it was later re-released by Relapse, The Arsonist and the Architect, out of print again, is a quietly impressive slab of noise that's never quite gotten the respect it desperately deserves.

King Generator
King Generator
Tankcrimes
2008
If a second collaboration between Dave Witte and Mike Hill doesn't excite you (Witte subbed in on drums for Anodyne's Red Was Her Favorite Color, and tossed in a rare guitar performancee for good measur), then you're reading the wrong goddamn blog. Throw in Jamie Thomson of Shank and you've got a recipe for an asskicking hardcore experience. King Generator gave us seven awesome punk/grind songs as part of one-off collaboration in 2008. There's probably nothing here that you haven't heard before, but in the hands of three punk masters, King Generator bring it with the kind of confidence and panache that a lot of their younger challengers lack.

Hope Collapse
Year of the Leper
Inkblot Records
2005
Yet another Dave Witte one-off, this time he reunited with Carlos Ramirez and Andrew Orlando of Black Army Jacket to form Hope Collapse. The band banged out an EP of top shelf grind inspired by the likes of Terrorizer, Assuck, Repulsion, Siege, S.O.B, who all get namechecked in the liner notes. For the names involved and quality of musicianship at play, Year of the Leper has been criminally overlooked by too many people in their target demographic. From the start of first true song "Cold Steel Penetrates You Flesh," which is just as piercing as it sounds, the band rages like a post-millennial version of Assuck. They don't let up until the last notes of "Leper Convention" fade into oblivion. More than any other EP on this list, Hope Collapse deserves a sequel.

Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus
Simian Hybrid Prototype
The Spew
2004
Florida grind mouthful Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus' discography is essentially Simian Hybrid Prototype and a split with Despised Icon, but that's all it took to notch their mark on grindcore. From the Scott Hull production through the Paul Romano art, Simian Hybrid Prototype is a nasty, unnerving nugget of subversive grind that tries to shock like Anal Cunt with a college diploma rather than a handful of homophobic insults or what Agoraphobic Nosebleed used to be before they fell for their own shtick. Either way, the band wasn't able to keep it together beyond one EP and the split. Members went on to Khann and Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky, but neither of those outfits have been able to capture the spark of Bodies in the Gears of the Apparatus.

G&P review: King Generator

King Generator
King Generator
Tankcrimes
Mike Hill is a man who knows his way around a studio and his tenure with Anodyne, Versoma and Tombs to date has shown him consistently able to squeeze out Godzilla sounds on a Geico Gecko budget. All that is to say we’re gonna give the man a pass on King Generator’s self titled mini album, which sounds like it was recorded under a pillow in a room full of feathers. I’m assuming that’s got to be deliberate given King Generator’s throwback hardcore style and Hill’s track record behind a mixing board.
I’ve slotted this eight minute barrage between later Capitalist Casualties, Asshole Parade, Slight Slappers and Battletorn on my mp3 player, all of which serve as sign posts for King Generator’s blown out style.
Hill’s bass bleeds into Jamie Thomson’s (The Process/Shank) guitar lines, creating a nearly indistinguishable wall of fuzz while Dave Witte (every significant fast band in the last 15 years) blasts, thumps and whumps his way though all eight sweaty minutes of rapid tempo hardcore.
There’s nothing here that you haven’t heard a bazillion times before – Thomson unintelligibly barks and spits foam while the band chugs away at speeds pushing human endurance limits – but the trio, all of whom have toiled in DIY music since fastcore’s formative years, have the cred and the focus to pull it off successfully, and the album’s short run keeps tedium at bay even when they pull done-to-death stunts like slotting the three minute, down tempo song at the end of the album (“My One Regret”).
As with Hill’s Tombs project and ASRA’s debut on his Black Box label, Tankcrime smartly included a CD version with the single-sided 10-inch vinyl for lose lacking the 1s and 2s at home.
Some of these guys’ recent projects, such as Sino Basila or Hope Collapse, have regrettably been one-off projects rather than going affairs, but King Generator ably reach back into their collective experience to produce an eminently listenable collection of retro tunes. Here’s hoping this generator hasn’t run out of steam after one outing.