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.

Razing Arizona: Phoenix, Bloody Phoenix

Here’s pretty much all I know about Arizona: Alice Cooper has chosen to move there and live out his dotage playing golf and slinging hotdogs; its local sporting club recently lost some sort of athletic event of note; and, mercifully, its senior senator is not our 44th president.
Beyond that, I have no clue how that sunbaked corner of the United States spawned some of the most interesting and challenging metal and hardcore ever set to tape in the shape of Unruh, Wellington and everything that came after. But I should have figured a healthy dose of suburban teenage angst and open minds were part of its roots.
“We were a bunch of skater kids,” said Mike Bjella, bassist for Unruh, Wellington and Black Hell. "Hardly anything was cooler than carving a pentagram or the word ‘fuck’ into a lunch table. Music became something for our angst, we could scream at jocks, skinheads, war, sexism, racism, everything.”
Though Bjealla and guitarist Ryan Butler, the other piston that keeps Phoenix metal firing, would first cross paths playing pop punk, it was sludge trudge trio Wellington that they took their first steps toward crafting some unique and searing in its honesty.
“We loved Dystopia, Rorschach, and Eyehategod and kinda mixed the three,” Butler said. “We just loved sludge and doom.”
The collaboration would ultimately find Bjella upping the tempo when he joined grind and punk progenitors Unruh to write and record the crucial classic Setting Fire to Sinking Ships, which Butler said drew heavily from his love of Assuck, Integrity, Voice of Reason, Entombed and Rorschach.
Part of what seems to make the Copper State’s musical culture so diverse is the pushmi-pullyu dynamic of Butler’s need for grindcore speed and Bjella’s leaden stride to doomsville.
“I can only really speak for Bjella and I, but it's definitely safe to say the we're both into really diverse music,” Butler said. “Obviously we love the heavy stuff more than anything else and I'm way more into death metal and he's way more into stoner rock.”
Their metallic tortoise and hare routine kept them and their co-conspirators from sinking into the same kind of Xerox stagnation that would plague a place like Gothenburg. But the pioneering music of Unruh and Wellington and all that followed can’t be traced back to some specific to Arizona, Bjella said. Instead, it was a case of thinking globally and acting locally.
“We would read about other ‘scenes’ around the country even internationally and we just wanted to become a part of that,” Bjella said. “Not to say it didn't exist in Arizona because it did, there were shows, clubs, bands we just weren't a part of that yet. Eastside records would let us browse the zines and hang out. Bands appearing heavily on my mixtapes were, EHG, Grief, Corrupted, MITB, Dystopia, Carcinogen, Rorshach, Brutal Truth. To me the influences are obvious. We wanted to be metal and our ability made us what it was. So yeah, I think the scene influenced us but it was on a global and personal scale not just something from Arizona.”
That desire for forward thinking experimentation doesn’t stop just because a band has coalesced and its component members have roughly agreed on a sound, Bjella said. No band’s sound is set in stone.
“Black Hell is taking all of our past experiences and influences and approaching that with song writing. The goal is to write songs. We’re trying. There are a lot of personalities and ideas that get involved,” he said. “When you talk about difference between bands wait till you hear how different the new album is compared to the last. A lot of us in the band think if you liked the last album chances are you’re going to hate this one; it’s that different. Hopefully that is not the case.”
Though he may be channeling Earache circa 1989 with day job band Landmine Marathon, Butler, who hopes to release some long shelved songs from a grindcore side project with Phobia’s Shane McLachlan soon, said he’s open to an ever wider array of influences these days, particularly after a long day sitting in the producers chair recording other people’s music.
“If I have to work with some metal band who's not so great for 40 hours, then I'll probably put on some Elliott Smith,” he said. “And sometimes it works the opposite, like, I'm working with the Funeral Pyre right now and they're very good at melodic Swedish black metal riffs and it makes me want to pull out certain records of that style. Generally, though, I won't want to listen to music for a few hours after I work until I've settled down and want to read a book or something. Eight to 10 hours a day of the same songs over and over is often more than enough music for a day.”
Despite that mash of influences, even Butler is at a loss to explain Phoenix’s musical fecundity.
“I don't think there's anything in the water that makes us do varied stuff,” Butler said. “We're just music fans, ya know? Most bands I've started have started with a loose blueprint and generally go in a little different direction, which is only natural.”

Razing Arizona: Unruh (Part 2)

Unruh
Setting Fire to Sinking Ships
Pessimiser/Theologian
1998
A scorched earth masterpiece of punk and metal, Unruh’s farewell album is a fevered holocaust of raining brimstone that saw the quartet stretching its collective creativity to sculpt music out of living flame. Everything that made Misery Strengthened Faith such a quiet landmark was goosed up another notch on Setting Fire to Sinking Ships.
The Phoenix quartet were clearly serious about growing as drummer Bill Fees and guitarist Ryan Butler broke out piano and viola to grace their hardcore meets grind at a Noothgrush swapmeet aesthetic on opener “Spoonful of Tar,” which undergirds Terrorizer grind with rolling hardcore circle pit drums and Mike Edwards’ gargling with Drano punk wail. The tribal drumming and ringing note opener of “Finite” could have been lifted any transitional Neurosis album before the song is immolated Bolt Thrower tempo death metal. Adding to the stability and low and butchery was bassist Mike Bjella, Butler’s songwriting partner in Wellington, who stepped into the vacant four string slot before recording on Setting Fire started.
Though only recorded a year after Misery, Butler’s guitar playing had matured, giving Unruh a more expansive and confident edge. Butler was able to build off the meandering introductory riffs of both “Finite” and “Faded Tattoos,” fully incorporating their themes into the whole song despite Unruh’s penchant for sudden downshifts and spontaneous blasting.
What may have been Unruh’s most compelling trait was its anchor in everyday life. Where other metal bands were content with escapist fantasies of Satan, dragons or violent revolution, Unruh managed to turn a journalistic eye on the traumas, triumphs and tragedies going on around them without sliding into tuff guy/you stabbed me in the back hardcore cliché. The domestic dispute sample that kicks off “Complex” is disturbingly believable while “Layman’s Gallows” is the story of a laid off factory worker told in the spare, honest prose of Hemmingway.
While Unruh would only release one more song on a split with Creation is Crucifixion before internal turmoil pulled them apart, Setting Fire to Sinking Ships rightly remains a milestone of metal and hardcore.

Fittingly for a band from Phoenix, what was to rise from the ashes of Unruh would be just as spectacular.

Razing Arizona: Unruh (Part 1)

Inarguably the greatest family tree in metal is Napalm Death, which counts Godflesh, Jesu, a million Mick Harris solo albums, Cathedral and Carcass among its progeny and cousins while intermarrying with Benediction, Extreme Noise Terror, Righteous Pigs, Terrorizer and Unseen Terror. From that initial teenage trio we’ve gotten a lineage of bold experimentation and rough hewn gutter level artistry that’s unsurpassed in metal.
Though it may not boast as varied and lauded a pedigree as its British relations, America can boast its own idiosyncratic family tree of forward thinking metallions who continue to mold masterpieces out of punk, metal and sludge.
And it was birthed in Arizona of all places.

Unruh
Misery Strengthened Faith
King of the Monsters
1997
Named for a New Jersey spree killer from the 1940s, these skate punks’ unassuming debut album was the kind of hardcore and metal crossover record that you would expect to find on Prank right about this time, sharing more than a little musical headspace with Damad’s Rise and Fall.
Crust punk riffs played at grindcore speeds with an undercurrent of sludge dynamics, Unruh’s Misery Strengthened Faith built on the concussive assault shown on their earliest 7-inch, comp and split appearances, furthering refining the band’s mix of abrasive metal and atmospheric breaks and musical white space.
Guitarist Ryan Butler and the band’s ever shifting roster of bassists used their instruments like bludgeons, creating cudgels of sound while drummer Bill Fees mixed up his sheer speed with the kind of fills and deft touch unusual for a punk band.
The ominous build of “Ugly Inside” combusts with a scorched desert heat that once again dissipates, leaving a sizzling mirage in its wake while “Jab Job’s” neck-snapping grind-to-sludge transition hinted at the kind of artistry that would follow. Album closer “Fear and Loathing Among the Working Class’” no tempo guitar scrimshaw could have grace just about any Stephen O’Malley.
Lyrically, frontman Mike Edwards had a knack for stripmining blue collar unease – both religious and economic – on songs like “Fear and Loathing” and “Salt Lake of Fire and Brimstone.” The black eye sludge of “Rebirth of Family Values” stalks the album like a drunken, abusive – yet overly religious – father who takes Proverbs’ warning against sparing the rod a little too literally.
For all of Misery Strengthened Faith’s innovation, though, it was merely a taster platter for what would come next.