Tuesday, November 10, 2015

Government By The Wealthy



I don't know why it took me 20+ years to stumble upon this classic slab of crusty powerviolence grindcore or whatever pretentious audio tags I'm using today. Ironically, I've been pretty aware of Plutocracy's existence for some time, somewhat ashamedly from perusing the endless porn-laden liner notes (and "thank you's") on a few of my dusty Meat Shits 7-inchers of which Kindred (guitar), Max (drums) and Thomas (guitar) were all musicians(?) in at one time of another. Regardless of their pornogrind origins, Plutocracy's debut LP Dankstahz is chock full of crusty stop/start mincecore (what I always wished Man Is The Bastard actually sounded like) interspersed with solid, riff-heavy grind. Wicked fast A.C.-esque blastcore screeches to a blistering halt and crawls along at a leaden pace with some cool crusty Dystopia-vocal tradeoffs. Completely at the forefront of what better-supported bands were dropping at the time (and it's tough to know who actually influenced who), it's too bad these guys never broke out of Palo Alto. And the old-school rap samples are priceless. Surprisingly, Plutocracy had a tough time actually getting Dankstahz on record shelves, most of this LP (recorded in 1992) didn't see the light of stereos until their eponymous compilation CD dropped in '94. Evidently dropped by both Psychoslaughter and Schematics Records (how? why?), the pressed vinyl sat in a warehouse before one of the band members hand-screened a bunch of covers and finally got it in the stores years later (completists note there was a limited 10" that came out on a Germany label in '96 as well). For those interested in the further musical endeavors of the posse surrounding Plutocracy check out this blog run by Agents Of Satan vocalist Jason Balsells - lots of good downloads and stories. Enjoy.


2 comments:

Icky said...

NOR-CAL SUPREMACY!!!

winston95 said...

Ha! You know it brother!