G&P review: Doom (Crust Punk Reissue Week Part 2)

Doom
Rush Hour of the Gods
Violent Change
Five cult fanatics released lethal sarin gas on the legendarily overcrowded Tokyo subway system at the height of rush hour on March 20, 1995, killing five and injuring fifty on the whim of a self-proclaimed prophet who sought to either hasten the apocalypse or overthrow the Japanese government.
Self-described “Sacred Emperor of Japan” Shoko Asahara’s brutal terror attack was part of Japan’s “rush hour of the gods,” a cultural malaise that birthed a host of competing religious cults, some benign quests for enlightenment and others truly malevolent.
A year after the attacks, British crust punkers Doom, back with yet another of their famed lineup overhauls, turned their own jaundiced eye on religions with their own Rush Hour of the Gods.
Expanding on Total Doom’s Discharge worship, Rush Hour of the Gods features longer songs, a second guitar and generally more polished production.
Rush Hour’s trebly guitar tones slices like a rusty hacksaw through the album’s 11 tracks before giving way to the better produced songs from the split with Cress. The simple, repetitive, sing-along chorus of “Death Trap” is an especially fine example of later Doom’s ability to pen a catchy tune.
Doom’s one attempt to break up the dun dun datting, though, was a bit of a misstep. The sampled voices and bleeping, blorping music of the title track, however, serves as a reminder 12 years later that plopping a bleeping, blorping song in the middle of a scathing punk assault is still usually a really, really bad idea.
Despite that faux pas, Violent Change did the crusties a favor by putting Rush Hour of the Gods back in circulation. But while there’s no denying Doom’s place in the crust punk pantheon, some PR flacky (wait, wait, a PR flacky for crust?!?!?!!? Wtf???) got a little over-excited while penning this hilariously hyperbolic ad copy spotted at Interpunk:
“Doom single-handedly created the Crust Punk genre that is currently enjoying a huge resurgence and their influence on the current scene is comparable to Slayer’s influence on the current thrash metal revival.”
Maybe if you ignore Amebix, Crass, Flux of Pink Indians, Disrupt and a host of others. Doom’s ripping assault already assures their place in punk Valhalla, so there’s no need for ridiculous exaggeration.

G&P review: Amebix (Crust Punk Reissue Week Part 1)

Amebix
No Sanctuary: The Spiderleg Recordings
Alternative Tentacles
“No Gods, No Masters” – amazing how that simple, iconic statement managed to sum up the collective outlook of not only Amebix but subsequent generations of crust punks and metal minions.
Hell, it’s such an anthemic idea Amebix recycled it a few years later on Monolith’s “Chain Reaction.”
Amebix dressed like the Cult and rocked like Venom gone punk and this remastered collection typifies pretty much everything that would define crust.
After a legal skirmish lasting a few years, Alternative Tentacles, which released Amebix’s stone fucking classic Arise!, has finally secure the rights to release the punkers’ earliest music. These larval tracks, while far more simplistic than those that would appear on later albums, are a significant trip through the WABAC machine to view the birth of what would become crust punk.
The outlook is suitably apocalyptic and the songs lack any subtlety and are generally declamatory – “No Gods, No Masters,” “The Church is For Sinners” and “Sanctuary” (as in there is no). Though Amebix’s swampy dynamics were already in play, but the later metallic influences were only in their nascent stages.
Though not as polished or as crucial as their later output, Amebix recorded these earliest songs with scrounged money while the band was living in Bristol squats with junkies and hookers. The songs’ production lags well behind later albums and that poor production often saps the music’s energy and immediacy. But “Curfew” is a short, fast and loud punk battering ram, “Sunshine Ward” is the kind of drug addled tour throw the psychoward Amebix would later perfect on “Largactyl” and the ferocious roar of “Winter” is a sign post to everything that would be realized on Arise!
Heavy Metal Records put kiss off record Monolith back in widespread circulation last year and now Alternative Tentacles is assuring the third wing of the Amebix triptych is readily available, allowing us to trace the progression of crust’s seminal auteurs from an ugly British squat straight through their metal inflected denouement.

Carcass Word of the Day Calendar: Aug. 23, 2008

I think we can all agree Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is a classic on par with Citizen Kane (if you don’t, you’re in the wrong place). But some of Hooper’s later work, to be generous, has been a tragi-comic tour through the world of EPIC FAIL. Case in point, 1995’s The Mangler, an adapted Stephen King story about a laundry folding machine with a taste for erythrocytes, as Carcass would dub them.
The real problem, for me, was apparent from the outset with King’s story. Who of us regularly comes into contact with a laundry folding machine? It’s way too abstract to the average human existence. Maniacal cars that want you all to yourself, that’s something most of us can wrap our brains around.
So Stephen, if you’re reading, let me give you an idea ripped straight from Reek of Putrefaction: There are few things more horrific than an office microwave, the poorly cleaned locus of most virulent strains of workplace pathogens. Just to up the queasy factor, taking your shmutz encrusted office microwave and try to use it to gestate a baby as Carcass suggested with “Mircrowaved Uterogestation.”
Unfortunately, some retard in Ohio ignored the obligatory “do not try this at home” warning.

Fomentatious perflation hydrogenates your foetal cistern
Coagulating haemorrhage and your congenital hernia
Dehydrated soup – crumbling hygroma
Pectified sludge – dank, acrid aroma
Clotting uteral mucus, dissipating your foetus
Melting your uterus and evaporating your cyesis
Your foetus is reconstituted by warm, molten enzymes
Slowly digested in a microwaved slime
Your stomach is churning, heat effervescing your succus
Your innards running like hot, sticky mucus
Mangled uterogestation, your perimetrium clots
Your inside cooking, steaming and hot

Foment – v. to encourage rebellion or discord
Perflate – v. to blow through
Hydrogenate – v. to add hydrogen to a molecule
Coagulate – v. to congeal from a liquid into a thickened mass
Congenital – adj. inborn, a condition present a birth
Hernia – n. the protrusion of an organ through its surrounding tissues, particularly in the abdomen
Hyrgroma – n. a collection of cerebrospinal fluid without blood
Pectate – v. to turn tissues into a salt of pectic acid
Cyesis – n. pregnancy
Effervesce – v. to give off bubbles of gas
Succus – n. a fluid secreted by tissues
Perimetrium – n. the outer layer of the uterus

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: Deathcycle

Deathcycle
Prelude to Tyranny
Lifeline
I think we can all agree no matter who takes the oath of office January 20, it will be a relief knowing the era when mindlessly slapping a black and white mug of Georgie W. on the cover of your album was an considered an adequate substitute for actually having to offer some original commentary inside. Not that I’m sticking up for the authoritarian fuck, I’m just saying I’ve seen his simian smile on the cover of way too many wannabe political albums over the last 7.5 years.
New York killing crew Deathcyle, featuring members of Kill Your Idols, Neglect and None More Black, take the artistically lazy way out on second album Prelude to Tyranny, a well played if slightly past-its-sell-by-date collection of rough throated hardcore antics. There’s nothing hear you haven’t heard a million times before, solid Motorhead-meets-Discharge-with-a-dab-of-New-Yawk-stomp punk antics that round up the usual political suspects and march them before the wall and fire shopworn declamations against state violence and state control at them ad nauseum.
But as much as I wanted to hate them album just based on the list of required reading web sites on the album sleeve (Save the Internet – Yay; ridiculous 9/11 tr00fer sites – Boo), I have to admit some of the the songs are deceptively catchy, mixing fulminating rock fretboard work and a driving rhythm section work.
Aside from the stridently pedestrian politics, my real deal-breaker complaint is frontman Ron’s vocals are as monochromatic as the artwork, a hoarse, generic hardcore bark that could easily be shopped to any NYC bro down band if this whole poli-punk thing falls apart.
His one trick pony delivery makes the tired tirades all the more grating. If you write a tune called “Another Song” that proclaims it is “another song that can’t be bought/ by corporations with no heart” you might wanna spend a little extra writing time to guarantee it doesn’t sound like just another damn hardcore song. In fact, I couldn’t imagine anything more assembly line produced than this collection of 11 well played but ultimately forgettable hardcore songs.

G&P review: Winters in Osaka

Winters in Osaka
Swarm of Witches
One Sock
Like a 3 a.m. televangelist, Winters in Osaka have the pow-AH. But touting collaborators from members of Spazz, Exit-13, Iron Lung and Fuck the Facts, I had kinda expected that power to be of the –violence variety not the –electronics strain.
Though I’ve flirted with a Merzbow album or two, power electronics just has never been my thing. I prefer my Masami Akita filtered through Discordance Axis’ recognizable song structure, thanks.
Despite my unfamiliarity with the terrain and general antipathy to white noise as a musical form, I actually found Swarm of Witches fairly enjoyable, thanks to periodic bursts of recognizable song structure. The occasional outburst of drums, in particular, help.
The whole album reeks of claustrophobia – like chipping nails on brick walls trying to escape the cellar before Leatherface comes back paranoia – and would serve as a much better soundtrack to your average torture-heavy horror flick better than the buttrock hit du jour. “Wolfpussy’s” slow chiming chords rattle over stoic drum beats before the song erodes into waves of soothing static that rot into FX box scrape. “Flowers in the Bodies” gives way to insectile swarms of noise as white noise army ants climb across the song and devour and despoil any sense of melody that may be percolating under the surface. From there most of the tracks are slowly morphing blasts of three or four minute bursts of suffocating noise.
Though power electronics is outside my normal field of interest and well beyond any expertise I may claim, Swarm of Witches was perhaps the least annoying half an hour of feedback I’ve ever intentionally subjected myself to. In fact, I’ve been sitting on this review for a couple months now trying to figure out what to say about it because it’s certainly not what I expected when I blindly ordered it based on the list of collaborators.
If you’ve ever been curious what some of your more adventurous musicians might do in a studio freed from the restraint of having to write actual songs, Winters in Osaka will fulfill your curiosity admirably. But I don’t expect this will be in heavy rotation for most grinders.

Agathocles Addendum: Condolences

So as I do with everyone who was gracious enough to submit themselves to my scattershot interviewing style, I let Agathocles mainstay Jan Frederickx know the story was out, only to get this response a few hours later:

"Last thursday, Tony, our bassplayer, got cremated. He committed suicide last weekend."

If you've got a second, head over to the AG web site and drop those guys a note of support.