Razing Arizona: Black Hell

Black Hell
Deformers of the Universe
Hater of God
2006
Skew your perspective slightly and suddenly the golf and geezer friendly climes of Arizona seem less like a liverspot mecca and a tad more like a sun blasted hellscape where nothing will grow and yards have to be painted green. All of which must have been gnawing at Mike Bjella’s subconscious post-Unruh when the bassist recruited two thirds of fellow doomsters Carol Ann to form Black Hell, giving free reign to the stoner sludge anthems that had always been lurking wraithlike at the haunted edges of his songwriting on sole sludge manifesto, Deformers of the Universe.
Sheer away the obligatory intro and overlong ambient closer and you’re left with six, six, six tracks of swinging blackened doom. If you have visions of early High on Fire or Electric Wizard dancing in your heads, you’re not far off. But Andrew, I can hear you say, why do I need another Nth generation Black Sabbath clone when just about every doom band since after forever has dry humped that corpse into submission. Astute question, little grasshopper. The difference being where most members of the low and slow club seem fixated on “Sweet Leaf” and “Snowblind,” Black Hell are among the few to descant the insalubrious vibes of their forefathers, the corrosive paranoia of the Cold War, urban blight ennui and the misanthropic certainty humanity will leave nothing more than a smoking, radioactive crater as its cenotaph.
Black Hell draws more from Sabbath’s apocalyptic “Electric Funeral” and “Hand of Doom,” chronicling the end times when nuclear dukes (“Nuclear Duke,” which makes way for Iron Maiden twin guitar goodness beyond all the plodding) rain gasoline (“Rain Gasoline”) until everything burns (“Burn,” a galloping march to the end of the universe).
Black Hell proudly wear their Sabbathisms on their long sleeves and while they may not be the Masters of Reality, they have successfully deformed their particular corner of the universe.

Razing Arizona: Structure of Lies

Structure of Lies
Abacus
Deep Six
2002
After setting fire to a sinking Unruh, guitarist Ryan Butler and drummer Bill Fees sieved death metal chops and bulk through hardcore ethics and aggression with Structure of Lies.
The unholy spawn of a hitherto unrecounted Brokeback moment between Lennie Small and George Milton, Structure of Lies was a heavy shod behemoth that tried to balance dexterous Unruh songsmithing with crushing avalanche sonics.
Between splits with likeminded death/grinders Misery Index and Iranach, Structure of Lies gave the world Abacus, their sole solo effort, an 18 minute exploration of speed, shrieks and shred.
Album standout “Four Pinnacle Peaks” boasts neo-classical noodling atop a frosty black riff and blastbeat one-two punch that would even make the most grimm member of the korpsepaint kvlt bust a grin. “Masters of Nothing’s” hints of melody devolve into a crossover crust assault and chug-a-lug break stuff outrage as Fees leaves no section of his kit unsmashed and vocalist Cory Smith forcibly extracts his own tonsils without the aid of anesthesia.
The ligaments and connective tissue of the cyclopean beast were knit by bassist Christ Rutledge’s low slung but no less nimble fretwork, providing the sloshing, churning guts that powered the machine, freeing up Butler and second guitarist Adam Cogswell to lose the rhythm guitar and perform their Murray/Smith tradeoffs on “Burying the Undead.”
Unfortunately, like doomed Lennie, Structure of Lies was euthanized well before its time.

Razing Arizona: Wellington

Wellington
Discography
Deep Six
2000
Coeval with Unruh, Ryan Butler and Mike Bjella dropped the BPMs and a few octaves in Wellington, combining prime Cavity with the B side of My War for a stomp and stumble cacophony that shared wax with Noothgrush and shelf space with Grief.
Like those bands, Wellington’s testicle swinging sludge rested on an infrastructure of iron girded hardcore. Frilly shirts, bottles of Chablis and lame romantic poetry are nowhere in sight. This is street level gloom that barks back the toxic sludge of ozone, particulate matter and sulfur dioxide we breathe in each day overtop simmering rush hour rage riffs and creaking subway drumming.
While Butler and Bjella are dynamic, engaging songwriters, Wellington’s secret cache of WMDs was stashed atop the drum riser. While other doom and sludge drummers only stir from their Vicodin stupors every five or six measures to pound out a solitary beat, Gordon Heckaman pounds his kit like somebody slipped him a PCP mickey on “Friend, Son” and even ramps up to proto-blastbeat speeds on “Isolated in Despair.” “Harness” and “Shoes” actually rock out, which is rare for a sludge song and “Interlude” may be the best shotgun marriage of desultory doom and blastbeats outside of Disembowelment. Please try not to hold it against Wellington that Heckaman currently backstops Boston puss-metalers Powerman 5000.
Musically, one of Wellington’s most impressive feats was their bold use of white space for songwriters so young. The haunting drums only passages of “Please” recollect the Melvins’ “Oven” or Harvey Milk whisper to wail dynamics.
More than just a “featuring members of…” kind of band, Wellington deserve recognition for both their songwriting risks and successes.

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.

The Life of Bryan: Grind’s Premiere Drummer Just Tries to Keep the Beat

Novelist David Foster Wallace hit upon an ingenious idea in his hefty tome Infinite Jest: at some point in the near future corporations will be able to buy the naming rights to individual years. So instead of 2009, this would be the Year of the Perdue Wonder Chicken. With that inspiration, I say we all pool our scratch and retroactively buy up 2008 at a reduced price and rename it the Year of Bryan Fajardo’s Unfuckwithable Blastbeat.
If there were ever a candidate for grindcore’s equivalent of the Hart Memorial Trophy, it would be Fajardo for his wrist-shattering efforts to out-Witte drumming ubermensch Dave Witte. The year 2008 alone saw the guy backstop Discordance Axis-Jr. Noisear, bolster Phobia’s live presence, help Kill the Client notch a new personal best and still found time to collaborate with Jon Chang on GridLink (which I heard put out a decent enough album). In addition to a day job like you and me.
Shit, my arms are tired just typing that and I guarantee you I wasn’t moving at 200 bpm while Jon Chang shrieked at me to go even faster.
“It gets pretty crazy when I have two tours booked and they coincide with each other,” Fajardo said. “And flying all over the country is just part of the game.”
In a slight twist on Edison’s formula for success, Fajardo has risen to the top of the grind heap through 99 percent perspiration and 1 percent location. Seems like that guy is always in the right place at the right time when top flight bands come calling.
Case in point: being invited to perform a Discordance Axis cover with Noisear for the Our Last Day compilation (the leftovers from which ended up on Pyroclastic Annhialation) opened the door for Fajardo to slide into GridLink during one of that band’s well publicized personnel reallocations.
“Well, they were having problems finding a drummer that was able to pull off the speed they needed with out adding too much,” Fajardo said. “I pretty much kept to Chang’s ideas but was able to add my own styles.”
And it’s not just those of us outside looking in flipping over Amber Gray’s psychotic mix of Discordance Axis and neon flashing, pachinko hall, cold coffee in an aluminum soda can Japanese goodness. Somebody else got a tad fanboy over Matsubara’s post-Mortalized shred as well.
“I am pretty happy with the way it all turned out,” Fajardo said. “The music is just as intense as we planned. I must say the guitar playing on the record is what makes it one of my own favorite grind releases. Matsubara is amazing!”
And remember what we said earlier, if you’re gonna score prime grind real estate, it’s all location, location, location.
“It was pretty easy hooking up with the KTC dudes,” he said. “I actually live in the same city as these guys so we have more time to focus on writing and keeping the bands sound up to par. As far as input on writing, ee all put in equal creative freedom. I knew I wanted this record to be more intense and tighter than the previous efforts. It also helped that I got back from a tour with Phobia a day before we started recording Cleptocracy so I was pretty warmed up.”
That easy transition went both directions.
“He loves playing music. That's all he wants to do,” Kill the Client mouthpiece Champ Morgan said.
For all the intensity you hear on vinyl, Morgan said Fajardo remains zen when it’s time to hit the studio or pile into a van for a show, which probably helps him juggle the kind of course load that would crush your average college freshman.
“Brian, or ‘Fajita' as I like to call him, brings real precession and power to KTC.,” Morgan said. “He's very, very technical and knows what he wants to hear in the songs. He really has a great feel for grind music and in that he strengthens the backbone of what we are as a band. His speed is sickening. That's all I can say. I watch him sometimes just wondering how his hands and feet move that fast.”
So to sum up: Fajardo anchored the best grind release of 2008, backstopped an unappreciated legend of American metal on stage and propelled Texas’ finest to new heights of rectal ripping goodness. Oh and Noisear plan to grace us with new issue by the close of 2009 as well as the second installment of the finest compilation series since the crucial Cry Now, Cry Later albums.
“[Noisear] are writing new material for a full length that will be released on Six Weeks hopefully by the end of the year. Also recording for the next This Comp Kills Fascists Vol. Two on Relapse,” Fajardo said.
And somehow this drummer doesn’t see himself as the current king of the blastbeat heap.
“I don't really see myself as a top contender in the grind world but I appreciate that people are noticing what I do,” Fajardo said.
Modesty is all well and good, but at this rate, we may have to save up to rename 2009 after the guy as well.

G&P review: Narcosis

Narcosis
Best Served Cold
Earache
The Narcosis boys could really learn a few lessons in P.R. Slogging through their meandering liner notes to discography Best Served Cold, I’m left with the impression they didn’t particularly care for most of their recordings, they couldn’t hold a line up together and that the band never had a clear identity or vision. But I guess if you’re reading that, they’ve already got your $15 so the joke’s on you.
Time was when Earache equaled quality grind. If you’re nostalgic and think Best Served Cold marks some return to the glory days of 1989, you’re going to be disappointed. I couldn’t tell you the last Earache album I bought and I’m beginning to remember why.
These young Brits clearly imbibed Napalm Death and Unseen Terror with their mother’s milk and a few pints of bitter, and while they make an adequate racket and near sound barrier speeds, I just never get a firm sense of who or what Narcosis were actually trying to be and after reading their liner notes, I’m not sure they ever had a clue either.
While Narcosis in various incarnations was a deliciously bass-heavy grind outfit, they just never gelled as songwriters to make their particular brand of noise compelling, especially on the 10 minutes spent feeding a gerbil into a woodchipper that was “With a Sickening Thud.”
Lame attempts at ha-ha funny song titles that even a post-coma Seth Putnam would leave on the cutting room floor (“If Being a Cunt was People, You’d be China,” “Just Because They Say Christ When You Walk Into a Room Doesn’t Make You Jesus”) just come off as tired and derivative. While, the faux Carcass and Man Is the Bastard artwork inside is indeed clever it’s just one more symptom of the same disease.
Too often this overlong collection becomes the grindcore equivalent of elevator music: something that just buzzes in the background.
While Best Served Cold is certainly economical in these tough times, dishing up nearly 80 minutes of grind over 51 tracks, only the songs from the Romance album, which are smartly placed front and center, are really going to be worth repeated listening. Many of the EP and horrifically tinny live tracks collected here also just regurgitate songs you may or may not have heard the first go round. Really, how many versions of “Screaming I Hate You While I Slit My Own Throat” does one person need?
Money’s tight these days so Brutalex has agreed to share. Save your ducats.