Blast(beat) from the Past: Phobia

Phobia

Means of Existence

Slap-a-Ham (Reissued by Death Vomit)

1998

Ok, so 22 Random Acts of Violence and Cruel didn’t light my fire, but I submit that Phobia are likely America’s greatest gutter grind band. Where the earliest British grind was hopped up hardcore and continental Europeans trended toward a sleeker, more refined attack, it was that initial wave of Americans who were responsible for the burliest, street level grindcore and Phobia lead that pack.

While plenty of pixels have been spilled in praise of Phobia’s awesome debut, Return to Desolation, Means of Existence’s tighter, more visceral attack has always had the pride of place in my heart, partly for being my first Phobia record. It all starts with Paul Miner’s engineering and the band’s production efforts. Means of Existence sounds huge, elephantine, dinosauric, colossal, cyclopean even. Everything is panned to the lower registers and you can practically feel the reverberations coming off Steve Burda (guitar) and Luis Pereya’s (bass) amps. It’s a monstrous, violent, physical wall of rough faced-brick grating across exposed flesh. Shane McLachlan spits and snarls a litany of the world’s sins, his righteous indignation elevating him to the post of pitiless judge, unsympathetic jury and enthusiastic executioner. Backing it all up are John Haddad’s steam hammer blasts.

Means of Existence is From Enslavement to Obliteration filtered through Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Response’s recording session. “Scars” stalks your stereo like a caged feral animal biding its time until a careless zoo keeper forgets to lock the dog. Much mauling will ensue. The spiraling, sample-heavy “Snail” is yet another fine example of the Apocalypse Now principle of metal.

Two labels have fallen out from under this album, and it and its successor, Serenity Through Pain, are both currently out of print, which is fucking travesty because this is a looser, less polished Phobia than what you’ll hear on the Willowtip albums. There’s a sense of impending calamity and danger you just don’t get from the current generation of super clean, click tracked precision of modern production values and I think we’re all the poorer for it.

G&P Review: xBrainiax

xBrainiax
Hail Fastcore
625 Thrash/To Live a Lie
Oh fastcore gets hailed on this hour-long, 99-track compilation from this fleet-footed Michigan quartet. As an added bonus, power violence gets a shout out, punk gets a what’s up, hardcore high-fives, crust occasionally wakes up from its mystery pills and gutter wine stupor to mumble a friendly hello and Star Wars gets sampled liberally. Which pretty much tells you everything you need to know right there.
xBrainiax play fast punk and regardless your preferred nomenclature, they do it pretty damn well for a band that recorded most of these songs themselves in their practice space. Hail Fastcore is all frenetic drumming, indistinguishable guitars, unhinged and ranting vocals and largely indistinguishable songs that would probably rule your local VFW basement hall on a bill with Threatener (fitting given 625’s involvement) and Asshole Parade.
xBrainiax will never be accused of being mucsical visionaries, but they ably acquit themselves of a whole host of punk clichés with panache and aplomb. “Jaded, Twisted and Evil” is your classic example of the slow build intro giving way to breathless blast finish, and blink and you’ll miss it “Trekkie Killer” is the band’s equivalent of “You Suffer” (which they also cover along with Y, No Comment and Infest tunage). The band does whip out one truly unexpected WTF? moment late in the collection with “Idiot,” a five minute bit of ponderous epicus doomicus hardcore-icus that could have been swiped from St. Vitus’ cutting room floor. Unlike their brooding, oh so serious compatriots, xBrainiax prefer to let their seething sarcasm do the heavy lifting excoriating their targets on songs like “Finishing Last in the Human Race,” Lenny Kravitz is His Answer” and sly Dead Kennedys reference of “Young Republicans Fuck Off.”
You’ve probably heard a hundred other bands that sound exactly like xBrainiax but sometimes it’s nice when an old friend like fastcore comes back around to say hi or hail or whatever.

Lost in Translation

So here I was all excited. The comment thread to the Assault post a couple of weeks ago has just been exploding with comments in Japanese. Foolishly assuming that maybe I had caught the attention of either HG Fact or maybe the band, I spent a couple of days trying to find a decent translation. Sadly, my musical genius is not being bruited across the land of the rising sun. But if anybody is taking a vacation to Tokyo and wants to know how to find "women who provide the sex" for "very modest renumeration" just ask me because now I know more than I care to about the for-pay Japanese sex trade or at least more than I'd picked up from copy of In the Miso Soup. So yeah, grindcore and hookers. The peanutbutter and chocolate of the blogosphere.

Blast(beat) from the Past: Inertia Kills

Inertia Kills
Tous Des Aveugles
Choking Hazard
2008
For a brief six months in 1995 Quebec’s Inertia Kills were not only one of the best From Enslavement to Obliteration cover bands working but they just may have been grindcore’s finest purveyors of hockey hair as well. Blastbeats and the ape drape, a combination you could only find in Canada or perhaps the seedier hockey rinks of Pennsylvania.
The band, featuring members of Immoral Squad other Quebec outfits too obscure to warrant a mention on Metal Archives, only had a pair of 7-inches and a pair of unreleased cover songs to mark their half year existence. The production is the audio equivalent of a leaking sewage pipe (that’s a compliment, btw). In fact, all of Tous Des Aveugles (All the Blind, according to my rusty college French) is an index fossil from an age before precision when grind was still slick with punk’s afterbirth.
The songs are all sloppy blastbeats cribbed from the Mick Harris playbook and have never been in the same timezone as a click track, fighting through distended intestinal tract grunts and forceful neutering yawps and an undifferentiated wash of guitar crunch. Songs like “Reforge Your Thoughts” kick off with four count drum beats, an unbroken strand of punk DNA that sneaks its way to the surface. The songs themselves are kamikaze races between the song’s end and impending musical collapse with a few obligatory mid tempo crushers (“Awake,” the title track) thrown in to relieve the blastbeats and clumsily edited samples (a classic from Ren and Stimpy on “Toy of Leisure,” Yoda’s wisdom kicking off “Ou”). The package is rounded out by covers of Crucifix and The Fact Remains That (Yeah, me neither). At just about 18 minutes, Tous Des Aveugles doesn’t overstay its welcome, providing a perfect snapshop to a transitional era in grind’s history when the punk was still strong and the ape drape was still a viable fashion choice.

G&P Review: Weekend Nachos

Weekend Nachos
Punish and Destroy/Torture
RSR
With a new album due to drop on Relapse, I belatedly turn my attention to Punish and Destroy/Torture, a collection of Weekend Nachos’ early stabs of second wave power violence. It’s the sonic equivalent of wiping out on your skateboard into a gravel pit.
Burlier and more refined than Spoonful of Vicodin, Weekend Nachos work the same territory as their fellow Empire Staters, cobbled together from shrapnel labeled Man is the Bastard and Apartment 213.
While the strained hardcore vocals trend a tad too monotonous, powers through that sole drawback with violence. Paired together, the EPs (Torture is the heavier of the two) practically present a survey course of every subgenre ever suffixed by –violence or –core. “Punish and Destroy” spends four minutes crawling through Winter’s back catalogue and “Intro” devolves from meticulously plotted electronic blorp to ominously ringing guitar chimes from transitional era Neurosis. But Weekend Nachos also draw in the Dismember-ed death opening of “Dimension X,” rocked cock swing of “American Hardcore” or slow noise rock dissolution of closer “Sludge.” Every couple of songs finds the Nachos appropriating another shard of the fragmented punk and metal scene, holding them up to the light and marveling at the refractions. While that may not initially sound cohesive, Weekend Nachos manage to make all of it their own. From one more interesting This Comp Kills Fascists alum, I’m now officially curious to see what the band can do on Relapse’s dime.

My Name is Legion, For We are Many

As if defining grindcore weren’t a confounding enough task, there’s a subset of practitioners such as Spoonful of Vicodin that seem determined to set themselves apart from their peers and colleagues by inventing a micro-genre they can solely inhabit. Is being a humble grind band that bad? Join me on a trip through grind’s far-flung and constantly evolving nomenclature.

Grindcore
Napalm Death
Scum
Earache
1987

Rotcore
Spoonful of Vicodin
Rotcore
Bones Brigade
2009

Mincecore
Agathocles
Grind is Protest
Dis-Order
2009

Darkness Grind
324
Rebelgrind
HG:Fact
2006

Northern Hyperblast
Kataklysm
The Mystical Gate of Reincarnation
Nuclear Blast
1993

Panzergrind
F.A.M.
Bullet(in)
Scrotum Jus
2007

G&P Review: Spoonful of Vicodin

Spoonful of Vicodin
Rotcore
Bones Brigade
Everybody sing along now: Just a spoonful of vicodin helps the power-violence-inflected-with-thrash-shriek-and-grindcore-gurgle go down.
OK, so I’m no Julie Andrews, but for the authentic article spin Spoonful of Vicodin’s “Paved Paradise,” which deftly interweaves the Disney ditty with intermittent blasts of crusty noise. No mean sample, the two components trade off of each other, creating a wholly unique song from their disparate parts.
Terrible New York twosome Tim (drums) and Sarah (guitars) conjure the chaos that ensues after a suicide bomb goes off in a crowded market with the compilation Rotcore. The vocals careen between a manic 12 latte chatter and a starvation stomach rumble grunt and the production is just as punk as fuck.
A majority of Rotcore’s collected songs, 27 tunes in a whisker under 15 minutes, come with authentic “Smoke, Grind, and Sleep Production” courtesy of Danny Lilker. How you respond to semper lo-fidelis production will largely determine how you respond to Spoonful of Vicodin’s strain of rotcore. However, deliberately crude the music and production may be, the band carefully honed the exquisite sarcasm of their songs. “My Idea of Anarchy is Taking a Dump on Company Time,” “God Wins at Everything” and “Tapeworms in Punk, a Documentary” pretty much demand you pore over the lyric sheet.
Spoonful of Vicodin have the tunes and the sarcasm to make it all go down. No extra sugar needed.