Punk as Fuck [Merry Fucking Xmas Edition]: SNFU

SNFU
…And No One Else Wanted to Play
BYO Records
1984
Given that it’s the Christmas season, I just want to address something that has been festering for decades now: fuck all the Whos down in Whoville, the tall and the small. Fuck who hash, fuck roast beast and fuck Cindy Lou Who who was no more than two.
You see, I get pissed each and every year when the Grinch goes soft because those fucking Whos have it coming. They create an ear piercing racket annoying their neighbor three miles away and for some reason he’s the asshole? It’s called a fucking noise ordinance violation. You’re just lucky he only stole your Christmas presents rather than suing those antennae things off the Whos’ heads and foreclosing on the whole fucking town.
So in my shriveled, bitter heart, nothing really speaks to my yuletide malaise like the cover of Canadian skate punks SNFU’s debut record …And No One Else Wanted to Play. Christ, this is such a fucking great album. I can go for months without even thinking about it, but once I put it on, it’s easily a top 20 lifetime favorite kind of album. Not as bratty as the Circle Jerks, not a pointlessly goofy as Angry Samoans, frontman Chi Pig’s sardonic delivery and wry and hysterical lyrics circle pit with the Brothers Belke’s guitarmageddon – the rhythm section rotated almost as often as Naked Aggression’s – to soundtrack a perfectly wasted summer with your skate rat friends. The songs have that punk simplicity paired with a just-short-of-doubled-picked thrash crunch that set them apart from their contemporaries. And metal heads may want to give the bass and drum opener of “Seeing Life Through the Bottom of a Bottle” because it may actually be the genesis of Carcass’ oft-copied “Ruptured in Purulence” riff.

SNFU – “Seeing Life Through the Bottom of a Bottle”

But more importantly, SNFU brought a slyly subversive sense of humor on the feminist-minded cafeteria jibe of “She’s Not on the Menu” or mystery meat ode to the “Cannibal Café,” which also highlights Chi Pig’s artful dodger way with the tongue twister lyrics.

SNFU – “Cannibal Café”

Unfortunately, that humor would degrade over time after the band jumped to Epitaph and started churning out less satisfying songs about the celebrity twat of the week (yay, a John Bobbit song. That will be totally topical 15 years later. Oh wait.). But … And No One Else Wanted to Play remains a seminal punk touchstone in my life. This is an album that nails everything punk should be: it’s hilarious, fun and played with a teenage abandon. I’m not generally the kind of person who looks back fondly on the teen years as the best days of my life, but throwing this on is almost enough to put me in what passes for the Christmas spirit.

False Flag Attack

I guess I was never what you could call a very orthodox punk. There were plenty of bands that were considered canonical that I just never could get into. Cases in point: though many would have dubbed me straight edge throughout high school and college, I despise Minor Threat (though “Filler” is a damn fine exception) and think Ian MacKaye is a self righteous prick. I also hate the Misfits and take an immediate loathing to the kind of toothless meatheads you see in pretty much every mall Hot Topic sporting that goofy skull logo.
Likewise, Black Flag was a band I struggled with for many years. A lot of it is because the whole Henry Rollins persona irritates the shit outta me for reasons I can’t quite articulate.
I eventually made my peace with Black Flag much later in life, backing my way into the band through the music of those they influenced. But I still thank Damaged is painfully overrated, particularly in light of Greg Ginn’s later masterworks. Ginn is simply the greatest punk to ever sorta tune a guitar and it was hearing his atonal template trickle down through the next few generations that brought me back around to the original.
Here are three bands that radically altered by thinking about Black Flag.

Sick of it All
If anybody can claim Rollins’ caterwaul/catharsis crown, it would be hardcore stalwart Tim Singer. Dude had a band called Family Man, f’fuckssakes, but most of you probably know him as the guy popping forehead veins in Deadguy. Now I loved Deadguy just as much as the next 'banger, but, for me, Kiss it Goodbye was always the most interesting and cathartic of Singer’s bands. And if I’m going to reach for one song by Singer, it’s going to be the titanic drone of “Sick Day,” which has helped me come to appreciate the B-side of My War more as I get older. In fact, I doubt this amazing song would even exist without that polarizing Black Flag album and the sepulchral misery of “Nothing Left Inside.” It defied the “play faster” ethos of the era by daring to get down with the doom. Hell, this was an era when Saint Vitus and Black Flag shared a label, something that still astounds 20 years later.

Fuck Yeah
If any band in recent years has fully embraced Black Flag’s proposition that punk is a process and not a product, it would have to be Canadian audio provocateurs Fucked Up. With a swing like Class of ’77 Brit punk band, Fucked Up also channeled Black Flag’s unique blend of down and dirty punk and elevated aspirations from the transitional Slip it In and Loose Nut albums with a toe tapper like the scorching “The Black Hats.” It sends a shout out to that era when Black Flag was coming out of a crippling lawsuit that essentially sidelined their efforts but gave them the space they needed to nurture a sound that just couldn’t be contained by the strictures of what passed for punk at the time. A song like “Bastard in Love” still had one Doc Marten firmly planted in Los Angeles’ grimy underbelly, but Ginn and (sigh, yes, even) Rollins were beginning to grapple with the expanded possibilities of lyrical narrative and sonic dynamism.

Harmonic Convergence
As I said, Black Flag’s more e/in-volved later albums are far more interesting to me than their early generic punk works, and nobody in hardcore has really pushed the songwriting aspect as much as Kurt Ballou and his co-conspirators in Converge. Converge’s quiet mastermind has fully embraced the notion of abrading traditional song structure with a scouring pad of atonal awesomeness filigreed with amazing single note runs that jolt me into immediate attention. In fact, it was songs like album of the decade contender Jane Doe’s opening “Concubine” that lead me back to late catalogue goodness like In My Head’s title track, which shames all of the Flag’s narrow minded three chord contemporaries for its shifting tempos, textures and trills.

Here’s a quick comp of the songs that lead me back to an appreciation of one of punk’s finest practitioners. Enjoy.
Meanwhile, this is my list of other supposedly classic bands that don’t do shit for me. What classics can’t you stand?

The Beatles
Black Sabbath without Ozzy
Cannibal Corpse
Death
Deicide
Dio
The Exploited
The Germs
Judas Priest
King Diamond
Led Zeppelin
Minor Threat
Misfits
Morbid Angel
Ozzy’s solo material
Pantera
Venom

Punk as Fuck: Subhumans (No, not that Subhumans)

Subhumans
Pissed Off…With Good Reason
Essential Noise/Virgin
1996
You know that line from the Dead Kennedys' song “Where Do Ya Draw the Line?,” the one that goes “In Toronto someone blew up/A cruise missile warhead plant/10 slightly hurt, 4 million dollars damage.” That “someone” included Gerry Hannah, bassist for Vancouver punks the Subhumans. Whether you consider what he did a laudable bit of direct action in defense of humanity and the environment or a petulant act of terrorism deserving of the five years he spent in prison, there was no denying where the Subhumans stood.
They were a critical, if often overlooked, transitional fossil in the development of ’80s style hardcore, whipping up a batch of classic punk/proto-hardcore somewhere between the Dicks and D.O.A. (Joe “Shithead” Keithley was a member of pre-Subhumans band the Skulls and singer Brian Goble later joined D.O.A. on bass). Pissed Off…With Good Reason, a best of sampler platter, makes the perfect gateway drug for the Subhumans.
Like their eponymous English cousins, the Vancouver band stood at the fulcrum between ’70s style punk, epitomized by the Sex Pistols and Damned, and the emerging, more aggressive hardcore scene. Their songs blended furious attack, scathing humor and vestiges of hummable melodies on songs like “Firing Squad.”

Subhumans – “Firing Squad”

No one was exempted from their lyrical brutality, not their homeland (“Oh Canaduh”), their southern neighbors (“American Commits Suicide”) or the oversexed teenage male haunting the seedier discos of the day (“Slave to My Dick”). But the secret sauce to their Big Mac was their ability to write ear worms. No matter how pissed off they may have been, the Subhumans knew their way around a hummable hook. And while I loves me some ’80s hardcore, the art of the catchy song was something that had been sacrificed along the way in the name of harder, faster, louder. Just not by the Subhumans.

Subhumans – “Escalator to Hell (Live)”

Punk Puck as Fuck: Two Man Advantage

Two Man Advantage
Drafted
Royalty
1998
The last hockey-themed post for a while (I promise), so what better sendoff than an album that swipes from Slap Shot right from the puck drop.
Befitting a bunch of Islanders fans, Two Man Advantage took a more blue collar angle on the whole “beer, hockey, girls” puck rock shtick than the Hanson Brothers. Why go to all the trouble brewing your own when you can just call for the beer ban between periods (“Beer Man”), marvel at your collection of empties (“Beer Today, Gone Tomorrow”) or just say fuck it and grab a bottle of Captain Morgan (“Captain Morgan”). They take a similarly direct approach to the whole girl aspect as well (“Pornographic”).
All well and good, but a puck rock band lives and dies by the quality of its on-ice repertoire and 2MA bring the hardcore with occasional melodic flourishes with the grace of a Guy LaFleur end to end rush (the sharp eyed perusing the album art will also spot the Assuck shirt peaking out from under bassist Teemu Heineken’s Two Man Advantage jersey for extra metal cred).
The guitars are gritty and grisly as the band (whose stage names are largely a combination of alcohol of choice and all stars of the 90s) racks up a Gordie Howe hat trick with the trio of dynasty-era Islanders homage “Hockey Fight (Clark Gilles),” “I Had a Dream About Hockey” (seriously, who doesn’t?) and the lamp lighting “Skating Down the Ice” which sports a charmingly melodious chorus and displays far more grace than you’d expect from a collection of beer league hockey bums.

Two Man Advantage – “Skating Down the Ice”

Hell, these guys are so dedicated to hockey goofery, they once pissed off the Zamboni company. Clark Gilles would be proud.

Punk Puck as Fuck: Hanson Brothers (Overtime!)

Hanson Brothers
Sudden Death
Konkurrent
1996
Go to any hockey game and you’ll likely see a bunch of bandwagon jumpers spilling overpriced piss water beer on newly bought jerseys sporting the names and numbers of the flavor of the month scoring champs and set up men. Living in D.C., that means every third person on the street is wearing an Ovechkin or Semin jersey. (Dr. Heimlich please pick up the white courtesy phone. The Verizon Center called about a choking victim.)
But you know you’ve spotted genuine hockey cognoscenti when you see someone sporting the jersey of a beloved local enforcer. [As a lifelong, die hard Blues fan I’m contractually required to own a shrine to Tony Twist and Kelly Chase.] So when the Hanson Brothers penned an acoustic ode to NHL penalty minute king Tiger Williams on second album Sudden Death, I can’t help but nod in approval even if he was briefly a fucking Red Wing. It’s the kind of song that on the surface is just another goof on hockey but is shot through with genuine admiration for a fan favorite.

Hanson Brothers – “He Looked a Lot Like Tiger Williams”

As an album, Sudden Death may be a tad less freewheeling than Gross Misconduct, but damn if the humor and songs aren’t more focused as they pen ditties to beer (“We’re Brewing”), impotence (“Not For Mary Lou”) and the women in your life [like my wife] who just can’t comprehend how you can spend nine hours a night during the playoffs watching game after game (“Danielle (She Don’t Care About Hockey)”). While NoMeansNo is plenty of proof the Wrights are no strangers to their instruments, Sudden Death was the first time they brought that same sheen to their punk alter egos with touches like the aforementioned “Tiger Williams” ballad or the bouncing puck skitter of the guitar solo on instigating minor mantra “Third Man In.” The band even rips an opening cover of the Hockey Night in Canada theme (aka “The Hockey Song”) that’s boisterous enough to be heard over Don Cherry’s loud-ass suits.

Punk Puck as Fuck: Hanson Brothers

Hanson Brothers
Gross Misconduct
Alternative Tentacles
1992
So it’s another Stanley Cup playoff and I’m left to play the “who do I hate least” game (Detroit and Chicago can go fuck themselves to death!) because my pitiful, underachieving can’t buy a fucking goal at home Blues couldn’t crack the top eight in the west. Again.
While my Al MacInnis jersey will like stay in the closet this spring (considering D.C.’s temperature and humidity are both 90, that’s probably a good idea), the postseason is always an excellent reason to crack out my modest store of “puck rock” classics.
At the top of that admittedly limited demographic would be the Hanson Brothers. No, not those fucking “Mmmbop” twats. Actually the Wright brothers from NoMeansNo and a handful of accomplices, the Hansons, named after everyone’s favorite cinematic goons, the Hansons hit upon the absurdly gleeful admixture of songs about hockey, beer, girls, hockey players who like beer, girls who drive Zambonis and glove dropping brawls back in 1992. When everyone else was moping to the tunes of a Seattle suicide, the Hansons just wanted the world to lighten up and have a little fun. And did I mention all the songs are loving Ramones homages? Even to the point of parodying DeeDee’s distinctive yelp in the background.
True romantics, the Hansons lard Gross Misconduct with songs about robot girlfriends (“My Girlfriend’s a Robot”), brain dead girlfriends (“Comatose”), imaginary girlfriends (“Jack Off”) and that awesomely cute chick who drives the Zamboni between periods (“Sabrina”) all done in that distinctively toe-tapping Ramones style.

Hanson Brothers – “Sabrina”

But no puck rock band worth their foil-wrapped knuckles if they couldn’t bring it on the ice and the Hansons crash the boards with the power play menace of instrumental “Total Goombah,” the game face grimace of “No Emotion,” and (again, fuck the Red Wings!) the Russian Red Wings hatin’ bench clearing anthem “Duke it Out.”

Hanson Brothers – “Duke it Out”

Oh and they also rewrite “Blitzkrieg Bop” as homebrew anthem “Blitzkrieg Hops.” You just can’t fuck with that. If the Hansons don’t beat you on the ice, they’ll beat you in the alley.

Punk as Fuck: Operation: Cliff Clavin

Operation: Cliff Clavin
Freedom of Choice
Plan-it-X
1996
You know that guy you met freshman year of college who had just discovered Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn (RIP) and suddenly felt qualified/compelled to weigh in on every aspect of America’s geopolitics? Hell, a few of us probably were that guy (hopefully most of us got better, Zinnions being the Randroids of the left, and all). But Operation: Cliff Clavin is what happens when that guy makes a record.

Operation: Cliff Clavin - "Stupid Stories"

Freedom of Choice is the kind of punk record you ended buying plenty of back in the 1990s when you were a bored teen who randomly ordered shit advertised in the back of Punk Planet, seduced by the hand-drawn art, obvious DIY ethic and the promise of two minute diatribes of toe-tapping lefty teen angst. While few of those records survived my various moves through the years, Operation: Cliff Clavin has managed to stick it out, even when I go years between spins.
Op:CC aspired to be Indiana’s answer to Propagandhi but ended up with a hilariously entertaining mash of earnest sloganeering and truly atrocious back up vocals that succeeds because of – rather than despite – it’s painfully DIY flaws. From the goofball art, personally answered letters (I know because I remember writing them about one of their albums in an era before email) and Xeroxed liner notes, this is the kind of self-produced record that’s pure anachronism in an age when all you need is a laptop to get your band out there.

Operation: Cliff Clavin - "C3PO Can Suck My Ass"

Smart ass punks that they were, the band close their album with a quartet of goofball covers, including probably the best rendition of Poison’s “Every Rose Has its Thorn” you’ll only be slightly less ashamed to admit loving. And you just know Op:CC didn’t bother to clear the rights on that one, which means Bret Michaels never got his royalty check, directly leading to Rock of Love. True Story.

Operation: Cliff Clavin - "Every Rose Has its Thorn"

A couple years later Op:CC would be back with second album - Paradise Lost - a new rhythm section, more sloganeering and even worse backing vocals.

Punk as Fuck: Naked Aggression

Naked Aggression
Gut Wringing Machine
Cargo
1998
Years before Green Day permanently debased the notion of punk rock for another generation by farting out bloated, self-involved concept albums about thoroughly safe topics such as hating George W. Bush, a tiny Southern California quartet penned a ghetto opera to age, doubt, insecurity and blame that was astonishing for its grace and sweeping in its vision of teen angst amid American suburbia.
Naked Aggression spent most of its early years as Generic Chick Fronted Punk Band Number 2,345,837,629, raving about how The Man and how he wouldn’t Hold Them Down (and yes, caps are absolutely essential for that breed of teen bravado). But then came Gut Wringing Machine and guitarist Phil Suchomel’s decision to fully integrate his classical training into his punk. That insight permeated through all elements of the band. Instead of generic declamations about the suckitude of suburban life, school, home and church, Naked Aggression turned inward, penning introspective songs about runaways, suicides, abuse victims and the kind of emotional turmoil that comes as you slowly age out of your adolescent rebellion and into something resembling adulthood. It was that maturity, reluctant it may be, that powered Gut Wringing Machine. Several songs fixate on the notion of living life without regrets before your inevitable death, particularly in “Chasing Dreams” and the title track. French horn, tubular bells and piano add startling sophisticated grace notes to the song “Gut Wringing Machine,” a forlorn ditty built on the tension between growing older and constant teen protestations that you’ll live your life the way you want without ever compromising or settling down.

Naked Aggression – “Gut Wringing Machine”

“Wound Up” is a blazing spitball of incommunicable adolescent rage that can’t identify much less articulate its source of frustration, just knowing it has to lash out at something while “Stay Away” offers a sympathetic portrait of the runaway impulse that neither offers excuses nor minimizes the slights and abuse that land kids on the streets. Against a backdrop of ringing tones and charging verses, “The Prose and Cons of Dying” begins to ask some serious questions about what exactly it means to rebel, something that never would have occurred to the band’s earlier incarnations.
Suchomel , who penned the lyrics and wrote the music, would die within a year of the album’s release and the band, which had boasted a new rhythm section with every new release, decided to add a new guitarist and soldier on, but they had already reached a startling pinnacle they would never likely reach again. Hope they don’t have any regrets.

Punk as Fuck: The Dicks

Shhhhh. Nobody tell Zmaj because I don’t want him to take this as me capitulating in our argument over whether grindcore is more punk than metal. As you may have heard before, I came to this whole grind thing by way of punk because, let’s face it, grind is the punk of metal. I started buying fewer and fewer punk records as grind became my idée fixe and many of those albums I did have got sold off during the peripatetic phases of my young adult life. However, punk still holds fond memories for me as my first real musical love (one day I’ll tell the story of how I went from Foreigner and Dire Straits to grindcore), fondly remembered like a first kiss. So periodically, I’m going to pull out beloved punk gems to share and reminisce over.

The Dicks
1980-1986
Alternative Tentacles
1997
The Dicks brought the pride of Pansy Division with the confrontational bitch slap of Black Flag, but wrapped through a narrative aesthetic that was more Hedwig than John Waters, courtesy of larger than life frontman Gary Floyd and his blues seared baritone that sounds like gnawed beer cans and gargled cigarette butts belting out street level observations about the most marginalized aspects of society against slashing punk rock battery. Floyd possessed a voice so soulful he could render a hoary punk cliché like “we don’t want no fucking war” refreshing and affecting for its world weary honesty and the genuine sense of despair driving it. He also proved himself to be one of the great punk rock raconteurs when he gay heckled a beer-flinging audience member mid-song during a live version of glory hole anthem “Saturday Night at the Bookstore” without breaking his stride.
While “Dicks Hate the Police” is probably their most famous song – deservedly so and largely due to being covered by Mudhoney, my favorite remains “Shit on Me,” a curb-side queen tale of gay hustlers so awesome Mike Watt of the Minutemen used it as his answering machine tape in the 1980s. Instead of a woe is me jeremiad on the misery of a life spent hooking, the song is a defiant brush back, sex wielded as a weapon in an era when Saint Ronnie of Reagan couldn’t even bring himself to utter “AIDS” for fear of offending the religious whackaloons who propelled him into office.

The Dicks – “Shit on Me”

When you talk about the Dicks you also have to acknowledge the divide between the Austin and San Francisco lineups, with the former being more visceral and street scummed while the latter grew more refined and self-consciously arty, building on Floyd’s inherent abilities as a story teller and gutter-level journalist and no song captured that searing insight better than the thoroughly despondent “Sidewalk Begging,” a song that should kick the homeless romanticism out of a legion of spoiled suburban crusty runaways.

The Dicks – “Sidewalk Begging”

Blast(beat) from the Past: Tumor Circus

Tumor Circus
Tumor Circus
Alternative Tentacles
1991
There’s a Bush presiding over ill-thought out Middle Eastern adventures from the White House, tabloid headlines and nightly newscasts are pretty much indistinguishable and people are losing their shit over the swine flu. Sound familiar? While that may read like a quick recap of the past six months, Tumor Circus prove that the more things change the more they stay the same.
Essentially a post-Dead Kennedys/pre-lawsuit Jello Biafra fronting Steel Pole Bathtub, Tumor Circus were a one off collaboration melding that familiar punk screech and scalpel sharp satirical verve with early
’90s brand noise rock. While lacking the heft of contemporaries like the Melvins or Helmet, Tumor Circus scrape the chrome off of abstract Frankenchrist side A-style guitar meanderings giving Biafra a new platform from which to pontificate.
The broader musical foundation gives him more room to explore new lyrical and vocal themes as with the crack pipe cowboy yelp of “The Man with the Corkscrew Eyes” or the black hole wail of “Calcutta-a-Go-Go” with vocals cutting against the steel door slam of the guitars.
While Biafra’s inimitable sarcasm teases and cavorts, he actually steps back from the political tirades (George H.W. Bush’s masturbatory introduction to Skull and Bones on “Hazing for Success,” aside) that built his rep to fulminate against sensationalist reporting on “Take Me Back or I’ll Drown the Dog” or sneer at viral apocalypse on “Swine Flu” (the whole reason I pulled this album out in the first place recently).
As a one shot album, Tumor Circus still holds up pretty well almost two decades later, but there are the occasional misstep like the 15 minute assisted suicide dirge of “Turn of the Respirator.” Pushing Jello’s already shrill vocals into even more nut-clenching, nerve shredding territory over top the kind of repetitive drone that reminds you that not everyone can hang with Earth or Sunn O)))’s no tempo trudge.
That aside, there’s always room for Jello.

G&P review: Black Ships

Black Ships
Omens
New Romance for Kids
The globe is infested with literally thousands of lesser punk and metal bands that would gladly walk the left hand path or swim against the everflowing stream for a snatch of the cyclopean citadel wall-thick guitar tone that bleeds out Omens’ opening song, “No Eulogy.”
Quebecois hardcore pirates Black Ships follow up their staggering Low EP, released earlier this year, with one of the finest hardcore records of the year, an amalgam of His Hero is Gone, a beefier Ghostlimb and every batch of basement kids who ever resolved to play short, fast and loud. Excise the melody from Ghostlimb or the Converge-isms from Trap Them and you have Black Ships, who work the same simple but convincing territory with an intelligence and sincerity that’s in far too short a supply in modern punk.
Antepenultimate song “The End,” a clear standout, rips through a decimated Grecian landscape like a scourge of slavering, yowling banshees, driving pestilence and disease before them like cattle.
The frontman’s frigid croak, which would find a welcoming home on many a norsk black metal record, drives icicles into what’s left of your psyche while the boys in the band scrape nightmares from the inside of your skull, leaving behind a 25 minute path of destruction to which Cthulhu, Pinhead or Nicke Anderson would proudly lay claim. It would be indecent and obscene for this to remain clandestine.

G&P review: Trash Talk

Trash Talk
Trash Talk
Trash Talk Collective
“It costs a lot to look this cheap,” busty balladeer Dolly Parton once mused, not inaccurately, I might add. The punk rock corollary would be it takes a lot of technical savvy to sound this perfectly raw.
Belying their punk as fuck packaging and assault, Trash Talk enlisted studio denizen to the stars Steve Albini to twiddle the knobs on their eponymous third album, a mired in muck assault of dirgy punk.
Though some of their songs step up to a quicktime march, Trash Talk are at their best when they’re drunkenly lumbering around the studio in a cough syrup overdose lurch.
Trash Talk actually manage to play the low, slow and simple card without managing to sound like fellow punk mopes Neurosis or Amebix, which ought to be hailed as an accomplishment at a time when imitation is the sincerest sign of a lack of imagination. Instead, Trash Talk’s ramblings can be best likened to Apartment 213 (right about the tempo of “Kill for Christ”) or Iron Lung at their slowest (e.g. the title track of Sexless//No Sex) with just a skootch of 16-ish stomp.
Combining self-released DIY ethics with the wisdom to actually enlist someone who knows a thing or two about production to helm the album, Trash Talk’s self-titled mini-album serves up 14 minutes of quality stomp even if they do the overplayed longest-song-at-the-end-of-the-album shtick like a metric butt-ton of bands before them.
My only quibble with the album, does Artificial Peace know Trash Talk swiped their inverted peace sign logo?

G&P review: Rudimentary Peni

Rudimentary Peni
No More Pain
Southern
“Pachelbel’s Canon in E,” the last track on Rudimentary Peni’s latest EP, No More Pain, may have you wondering if guitarist/artist/novelist/psychiatric patient Nick Blinko has been taking the right meds. Or any meds at all. The tune, a fuzz-drenched psychedelic version of Baroque organist Johann Pachelbel’s “Canon” seethes and scrawls like an amateur stoner rock band on the verge of blowing the fuses in mom and dad’s garage.
The unexpected twist is quite a feat for a band that has consistently pushed punk beyond its … erm … rudimentary limitations for the better part of three decades. It also confirms why Rudimentary Peni is still my favorite punk band.
Their fourth E.P. since 1995’s Pope Adrian 37th Psychristriatic, the band has turned its back on full lengths and pared the fluff from their songwriting, only issuing the best tunes in their queue. The result has been a string of consistently excellent 15 minute bursts of death rock every few years.
And at 20 minutes, No More Pain is the longest of their most recent offerings, blasting out delectable slices of their accustomed doom and gloom, such as the T.S. Elliot referencing opening “A Handful of Dust,” a grating, groaning meditation on death a million anime-haircutted bands in girl jeans would slit their wrists to have penned. But knowing Blinko’s history with mental illness and psychoactive pharmaceuticals, the near suicidal vibe of No More Pain rings more poignant than bratty.
Blinko’s deceptively simple riffs pack enough slice through his lyrical scars, leaving fresh wounds on his psyche during the ZZ Top shuffle of “Doodlebug Baby” and necrotic creak of “The Eyes of the Dead” while Grant Matthews’ busy, burbling bass work propels the songs over John Grenville’s solid drumming.
If you’re still hoping for another Cacophony or Death Church, you’ll be disappointed, but after treading their own dreary musical path for damn near 30 years, Rudimentary Peni’s latest shows a band in full command of its impressive talents forging ahead with a singularly bleak musical vision.

G&P review: Gallhammer (Better late than never edition)

Gallhammer
Ill Innocence
Peaceville
I meant to review these delightful doom pixies several months ago, y’know when this album actually came out. But after scouring several stores and being back ordered (twice) I just now got my hands on this solid, if rough, mash of Amebix and Hellhammer. I thought about skipping it, but Terrorizer just gave them a cover, so why not?
Yes, these Japanese sprites have a deep love of the crust, and that’s we’re gonna focus on. Instead of being yet another retread doom band or a novelty chick act, Gallhammer are mix up all of their influenced on their first international LP to craft a sound that is endearing in its wide eyed naiveté
The latest version of “Speed of Blood” comes off a little crisper if no edgier and “Delirium Daydream,” with its strummed acoustic intro, and “Ripper in the Gloom” chug along at mid-tempo punk speeds with crusty, grarled guitar lines screeching through the feedback laden mix. But one of the album’s most delightful moments is the third track, “Blind My Eyes,” a rawking punk number that channel’s Melt-Banana right down to the charming chirped Pokemon vocals.
The whole 50 minute affair is bookended by straight up sludgy doom such as the aptly titled penultimate track, “SLOG,” an eight minute dirge that goes spelunking in the caves where Stephen O’Malley conjures demon drones. The not quite as aptly titled closer “Long Scary Dream” gets two out of three right. It is indeed lengthy and has a wonderful somnambulistic quality that makes it a great soundtrack to sit down with Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comics, but it fails to evolve from mildly interesting phantasmagoria to outright nightmare.
Overall, Gallhammer have improved leaps and bounds over The Dawn of... proving they are not a novelty act stage managed by Peaceful and turning in an album, with a stunning all white layout, that would sit capably along side the other punky doomsters in your collection like Unearthly Trance.