Cape Cod Core

I knew about the Freeze for years long before I actually heard them - nearly every mailorder package I got from Ax/ction Records came with a zillion mini-flyers advertizing the band. Finally getting my hands on the killer Revenge Of The Kamikaze Stegosaurus From Outer Space! compilation LP years later at last gave me the chance to hear the Cape Cod townies at work. Their contribution, "Refrigerator Heaven," was a perfect piece of snotnose punk; funny lyrics, way too high on the treble with enough fuzz feedback to make your ears bleed. Probably the sound the Dead Milkmen were trying to get years later on Big Lizard. Regardless, The Freeze are still at it 30 years later, with a few token hiatuses and line up changes under their belt. Here's a 4-song gem from 1985 - probably them at their most hardcore - enjoy.

Go Patriots

 
Currently watching: The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers
Currently listening to: Disrupt Unrest

Sammy Davis Jr. 1925-1990

Here's a slab 'o back-in-the-day punk from one of my most favoritest bands, Austin's Butthole Surfers. 4 tracks incorporating blues, industrial, psychedelia and country in a way only a ton of LSD can make sense. Of course, "Moving To Florida" is my fave, maybe it's because my in-laws are leaving town on Wednesday to do the same - run out the clock guys, run out the clock...

Dig In

 
Currently watching: The Angry Red Planet
Currently listening to: EPMD Strictly Business

Marilyn Mishmash

Keepin' it on the GG Allin tip, here's a relatively rare promo CD released in 1993 by (defunct?) Marilyn Records. Of course, I bought it for GG's contribution (which would eventually be renamed as the eponymous track on his final album, Brutality & Bloodshed For All); surprisingly there's a couple other gems that I ended up liking a whole lot more. Chris Wilson's "The Derelicts" is a rockin' pirate-drinkin' epic in much the same vein as Ween's "The Blarney Stone" while Kim Fowley's "Rockin' In The Balkans" is a sweetly weird effort of psychedelia by one of the stranger personalities in music (and that's sayin' a lot). Enjoy.

Test It

 
Currently watching: The Machinist
Currently listening to: Honker Heaven!!! (FOTCP Sampler)

Solid Cali Death

West Coast death metal outfit Penalty morphed into the similarly-monikered Death Penalty in 1997, releasing a solid demo of gurgled riffage with a rather refreshing political slant. Tight production and musicianship elevate this one above the typical drek. Death Penalty stayed together long enough to record a full-length (1998's Conviction) before fading back into Vista, California obscurity.

P.S. I recently realized my old rip had a lot of skips and shit in it so here's a new clean rip - enjoy!

Guilty

 
Currently watching: Watchmen
Currently listening to: Macabre Grim Scary Tales

Essential Literature

So many folks have tried to output the definite biography on GG Allin. It started back in the day with Terry Snider's opus but he turned out to be an über-fan who just wanted to amass as much paraphernalia as he could. Next was Joe Coughlin who was (from my limited correspondence with him) a really dedicated guy; he was hung out to dry by quasi- "fans" and "friends" of the late scumfuc - poor guy buys a computer and gets 400 pages into it when he finds out his primary "source" was a fucking blowhard with a scrapbook of made up shit. If you can find an ish of Naked Agression #4 you can read about his frustrating journey or you can check up on his progress here and here. Regardless, with all that said, in comes Evan Cohen. Instead of trying to decrypt the message behind the madness, transrcibe lyrics, and find out where the Jabbers' first gig was, he simply scribbled a diary of 90 days touring with the recently paroled GG and the Murder Junkies. You could easily find a worse rock star bio, I finally finished the "major-release" bio Mustaine; and Cohen's slim 128 page diatribe of shitting, pissing, and jerking off make Megadeth look like a fucking knitting troupe. Cohen's got a great sense of humor and takes the position of a "happy to be part of the gang" fly-on-the-wall. Included is a humorous CD of snippets and impromptu jams, some recorded days before GG's death - enjoy.

Man, that's a scab!!!

 
Currently watching: Hardware
Currently listening to: Slightly Stoopid Everything You Need

Aussie Gore-core

Since I had all the lo-fi apparatus set up to pull A.C.'s pregap track off of CD, I thought I'd go ahead and do the same for Aussie grinders Blood Duster. Both Relapse releases of Yeest and Cunt have a techno-remix pregap monstrosity that is almost as annoying to listen to as it is to scan backwards without resetting the CD. Drop some X, get out your platforms and rock the dance floor. Enjoy if you can.

Crikey

Currently watching: Irreversible
Currently listening to: 2 Skinnee J's Volumizer

Lowering the bar...

Paul Ledney really had a tough act to follow after 1993's amazing Dethrone The Son Of God. His 1994 The Black Mist 7" came closest to the aura DTSOG attained; sadly, excrable production and the typical imperfections of a vinyl-only release kept that one from being a real gem. 2000's Man And Jinn was heralded as a profane return to form - in my opinion it's anything but. I guess I just don't get black metal, why does sounding like absolute shit mean you have the edge on being unholy? It's one thing when Abruptum are ad-libbing as more of a performance art thing - it's another when Ledney, who's proven he's a talented musician takes the easy way out with the typical grinding blastbeat wall of noise punctuated by a vocoded "aaaaaahhhhhhh" every now and then. The cover of Impaled Nazarene's "Goat Perversion" is really the only reason this EP made it onto the blog - and that's just because it's a great song in it's own right. Jehovah fo nruter eht rof gnitiaw llits.

Burn

 
Currently watching: The Freakmaker 
Currently listening to: Sister Souljah 360 Degrees Of Power

I'm Glad Sid's Dead

Like most people, I caught wind of good ol' Bloody F. Mess via his GG Allin worship zine "Hated In The Nation" back in '86 or so (I actually still have ish #2!). At the time he was fronting the Illinois punk trio Hate which managed to shit out some cassette-only albums (ahh, the 80's) dubbed over freebie Mormon tapes. Touring with GG and contributing both a steady stream of drugs and opening spoken word performances (much of this is documented on Insult & Injury Volume 2 - The Bloody Years), Bloody disbanded Hate and formed the Skabs in 1988. The result is a somewhat uneven 22 minutes of punk. A couple good songs here and there ("Mammogram Days" is a personal fave) but nothing really special. I guess I was expecting some more Allin-esque obscenity-laden smutcore but you can't blame the guy for trying to do his own thing outside the shadow of his quasi-hero that helped give him a career. Speaking of which, while I don't really know much of what Mess has done since 6th Grade Field Trip (save some oh, so tired pro-marijuana bandwagoning back when Cypress Hill were blowing up), I gotta say I think he got a bit of a raw deal in regards to the posthumous Allin legacy that peaked a decade or so ago. So what that Allin supposedly disowned him - this from the guy who preached "I Love Nothing"? And yeah, so Bloody released some kinda shitty-sounding live recordings to try and cash in on the cow - who cares? At that time everyone with a grade-Z video of the Public Animal was dubbing the shit and selling it through MMR. And lots are still doing it and they don't get half the criticism he did back when the iron was hot. Bloody was there when hardly anyone outside of New England knew who or what GG was, and he probably had as much to do with introducing the world to the late scumfuc genius as anyone.

Peoria Punk

 
Currently watching: Generation Kill
Currently listening to: James Brown The Payback

Portland Sludge

Ex-North Carolinians who brought to the West Coast their brand of southern fried dirt metal, a raw, sludgy canker sore of sound in the diseased vein of Eyehategod and Soilent Green. Nothing Positive Only Negative is the band's first major label release - ugly riffage that really got me hooked on the sludge genre. Big highlight of the album is the epic "Rough Sleep," the piss-in-your-face anthem for every sour relationship you've ever had. Unfortunately, NPON was also the band's last slab of sound, they broke up in 2009.

Pass The Time

 
Currently watching: Kichiku: Banquet of the Beasts
Currently listening to: Slipknot Slipknot

U R A FKNG LSR

Per their Myspace page: "Since 1992 Bile has been a festering globule of audio terrorism; A bastardized synthesis of subversive values and deviant sophistication completely devoid of the mainstream pop culture." Fueled by his disillusionment with thrash metal bands, lead singer Krztoff released Suckpump in 1994, the first audial assault from his ultimate "anti-band". It created quite a buzz in the band's hometown of NYC and the band continues to chug along "under the radar and off the grid" over fifteen years later with some significant notoriety under their belt ("banned from major American cities, cancelled tours, hotels ablaze, military smoke bombs, electrocution, tornadoes during NYC S&M block parties, arrests, denied access abroad or re-entry, prescription drug use, wrongly attacked by the ACT UP anti-violence to gays coalition, a Cherry Coke radio commercial, deaths, etc.") Yow. With all that being said, I can't get past considering Bile much more than just a poor-man's Ministry. It's the same socio-political vitriol in front of guitar-heavy industrio-metal, just sounding like it was recorded in a garage. Still, Bile was way ahead of most of the Al Jourgensen clones out there during the 90's and Suckpump holds its own to this day. If you dig it, check out 1996's Teknowhore as well - solid shit.

Get Out

 
Currently watching: Autumn
Currently listening to: Ministry The Land Of Rape And Honey

Hello, I Hate You

Probably A.C.'s tightest fifteen minutes, a blistering snapshot of the band's crossover from old-school blur to a more palatable grindcore. Well-produced and loud, it sounds far better then that 1995's muddy Everyone Must Be Killed, which this E.P. was actually the demo for. Since most A.C. stuff is pretty much anywhere you look on the internet, I thought I'd instead upload the annoying-to-find "pregap" bonus track found on Relapse's 10th anniversary re-release of the album. It's a perfectly ironic 'Cunt cover of the Doors' "Hello, I Love You," recorded for some Relapse compilation back in the day which I'm not sure ever saw the light of a jewel case. It ripped OK and I tried to get the levels consistent with the rest of the album, so enjoy. Interesting side note, then-guitarist John Kozik was out with kidney stones when Morbid Florist was recorded so Seth and Tim overdubbed the whole album as a 2-piece. As of now, they're still the only members in the band. Just sayin'.

Spin Jim, Spin

Currently watching: The Simpsons Movie
Currently listening to: Jane's Addiction Nothing's Shocking

Resurrection

To my dismay, Boston's excellent nü-metal outfit Reveille broke up in 2002, a split spawned from the typical "creative differences" that left a (recorded?) third album on the shelf. Soon after, however, vocalist Drew Simollardes and guitarist Greg Sullivan got back together to create Genuflect. Boasting a sound similar to their previous band, Genuflect released Rough Mix Demo in 2005, a septet of songs planned for their future album, 2007's The End Of The World ("Move" doesn't seem to have made the cut so it's an exclusive on this album). In my opinion the tunes sound much better then anything that made it onto World, they are raw, underproduced and angry.  A little more rap then metal but still listenable - I doubt Genuflect will ever put out a record as good as Reveille released but you can't have everything I guess.

Check It

Currently watching: A Perfect Getaway
Currently listening to: Jimi Hendrix Electric Ladyland

Random plug...

I don't know how I stumbled upon this webpage but I'm glad I did. A great collection of one-sheet comics done by the talented Matty Boy Anderson detailing the fall from grace of so many bands. Witty, well drawn and all-too-true, I even enjoy reading the ones about bands I couldn't care less about. And I gotta respect the guy for admitting he was a Meat Shits fan!

Funny Shit...

 
Currently watching: Survival Of The Dead
Currently listening to: Spore Gaia's Grasp

Live Shellfish

Another oddity from the brothers boognish, a live jam from July 15, 1991 playing as the Green Lipped Mussels. There seems to be some ambiguity between Ween fans as to the true moniker of the band; what little info I did find seems to suggest there already existed a jam band called the Green Lipped Mussels (composed of Dreiwitz, Guzda, Di Gesu and Harford) and the addition of Gene and Dean technically morphed the whole thing into the Jimmy Wilson Group (supported by the fact that everyone calls each other "Jim" during the gig). Regardless of what you want to call them, the guys on stage that hot Monday night two decades ago were Gene and Dean playing with Dave Dreiwitz (bass, duh), Matt Guzda (drums), Greg Di Gesu (guitar) and Chris Harford (guitar, vocals). Bassosaurus Andrew Weiss guest stars during Ween's "The Stallion Pt. 3". Recorded at New Brunswick, NJ's famous Court Tavern, the Mussels rip through a bunch of covers, Ween tunes, Harford tunes and Mussel originals with the same tenacity and humor you'd find in any Aaron and Mickey performance. My guess behind their pseudonym is this was some unannounced/surprise/private show for friends and for whatever reason (record label) they couldn't advertise themselves as "Ween". Deaner called the band "a white version of Kool And The Gang" and they supposedly reunited in 2009 for a couple shows with Harford (whether they actually played as the 'Mussels is anyone's guess though). With all that being said, my only gripe with this recording is the crappy mp3s. I originally pulled them from some random FTP site nearly a decade ago so the fact they are 128kbps isn't all that surprising but there is a LOT of hiss and compression noise, even for a bootleg. It doesn't take that much away from the performance but fair warning. I also discovered a CD cover I created way back in the day that I think looks pretty cool. It's included in PDF format with the music file.

8/20/14 update: A solid reupload with the most complete recording of the show I could find - culled from old Lostwave mp3's, FLACs from archive.org and a few other sources. Sadly the lossy limitations are still evident but it sounds as good as it probably ever will. I also updated the above post with some more factual info. Enjoy.

Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim, Jim and Jim

Currently watching: Redacted
Currently listening to: Electric Wizard Black Masses

Noisecore Nonsense

Sheesh! No sooner did I drop the Boredoms side project Z-Rock Hawaii then I was awash in another piece of Japanese noisecore phlegm - Osaka A.C. rip-offs Cunt Decide. Actually my introduction to the band was lead singer/screamer Manabu sending me the demo tape for his then-blurcore band, Senseless Apocalypse. I don't know if he thought I was a record label or fanzine or what, he sent the cassette completely unsolicited - side 1 was S.A., side 2 was a previous blur band of his called Cunt Decide. Kind of a Senseless Apocalypse 1.0 (less produced and more noisy), Cunt Decide blast through a hundred or so twenty-second tunes in 35 minutes. A few grooves here and there (á la Anal Cunt) but mostly a sheer wall of blastbeats and howling. I went ahead and sent him $5 for the demo - two bands spewing 500 songs in 90 minutes is worth a fin in my book. Senseless Apocalypse has since gone on to become a more typical (but definitely more listenable and talented) grindcore band and Manabu's still running the iconic Blurred Records so give 'em a listen!

579116952348

 
Currently watching: Married With Children (Season 9)
Currently listening to: No Fraud Love And Massmurder

I Feel Lovely...

What can you say about a band that has broken-up, reformed and changed styles more times than the fucking Bible has been rewritten? Suicidal Tendencies carved there niche in musical history with their 1983 eponymous debut - a tight 20-minute slab of SoCal hardcore which I still treasure to this day. Underproduced, underappreciated and underrated, Suicidal Tendencies broke up soon after Repo Man made "Institutionalized" a college radio hit only to reform in '87 as a relatively generic thrash band. Remember Join The Army? Probably the worst album ever released by Caroline/Suicidal Records, it was embarrassing back then trying to pretend the new ST was the old ST... and by the time the late 80's rolled around it was barely the same band, mainstay vocalist Mike Muir was the only holdover. OK, crossover thrash was the big thing at the time and ST grabbed hold to the bandwagon with their How Can I Laugh Tomorrow... and tried to suck up to their prog/thrash No Mercy incarnation with their ...Deja Vu release in '89. Yet I gotta give the Venice boys credit - 1990 was a perfect time to release what most feel is their strongest mainstream album: Lights... Camera... Revolution! "You Can't Bring Me Down" and "Send Me Your Money" were MTV staples (back when being an MTV staple actually meant something) and I think there were actually Grammy nominations for the album. LCR got the band a tour with Queensrÿche (I still got ticket stubs from that motherfucker!) and "Lovely" is easily the album's tightest track; admittedly while a bigger fan of their older stuff, I think the breaks and grooves (there's like 6 of them) were way ahead of what Anthrax or Faith No More were trying to do at the same time. At some point I grabbed the song's promo single (with bonus track!) and here it is. Since then, the history of ST has been annoying; an unforgivingly pathetic attempt to rekindle what started in '83 but can ya blame the guys? Reviews of their newer shit claimed fans "warmly welcomed" the new style.... really? Listening to "Suicidal Failure" has never been as cool as it was back in 8th grade. Good luck fellas.

La La La La La La

Currently watching: The Devil
Currently listening to: The Mung The Splatter Sessions

Bbbrrrblababrbrbrbrbleeeeeeyaaaaaaaa!!!

Back in their Pure Guava days, the brothers Boognish, still new to their "big label" contract with Elektra, were still openly jamming (and recording) with whomever they could find (Frente!, Kostars, Green Lipped Mussels, Chris Harford, etc.) with styles that weren't necessarily what Ween's record label endorsed. Among those bands were Japan's institutional Boredoms, four abrasive noise-core gods with whom Gene and Dean recorded eleven strange, quasi-listenable "songs" that start like a typical Ween track and morph into a screaming, blathering cacaphony of noise and babble. I love Ween, but do I love Z-Rock Hawaii? Well, yes and no. It's fun hearing Dean do his best George Thorogood impression while eYe is screaming bloody murder in the background, but to be honest it gets old really fast. It's just too fucking annoying. Sweetly delicate tracks like "I Get A Little Taste Of You" (which thankfully became a sans-screaming staple of Ween's shows in the mid-90's) get lost in the screeching and feedback. I'm sure the whole project was a big joke by two bands who happened to meet in the studio one afternoon and my annoyance is the punchline they're all laughing at but whatever. Boredoms are fine, for like two minutes. So listen to Z-Rock Hawaii one track at a time, it's a lot more digestible.

Chocolate And Cheese Synthesizer

 
Currently watching: Colors
Currently listening to: Cunt Sludge Jane Doe