The Dude abides...

Awesome record from Detroit one-man musical extraordinaire Dude. Shit, this motherfucker flies solo, dig? You only wish your home-grown 4-track recordings could lick the guava like this fucking guy. If you haven't realized, I was pleasantly surprised by Dude's amazing debut of which I stumbled upon after many drunken hours surveying the tripe on bandcamp. Influenced by a myriad of bands ranging from the Beatles to the Bee Gees (c'mon tell me you can't envision the "Spicks & Specks" chords during the opening to "In The Next Pocket"), Dude is channeling the vibe Ween and Beck brought to the forefront a decade ago. An easily listenable album worth some of your hard earned duckets. Enjoy.

iamdude

loud. noisy. grating.

Sweet fucking debut EP from a bunch of insane Austrian grinders; this is not the same defunct post-metal Brooklyn, NY two-piece I raved about a few years ago. Instead Orphan blasts forth from the middle of nowhere (actually Linz, Austria) and are a blistering amalgam of metalcore (Burnt By The Sun maybe?) grind, and insane break-heavy hardcore à la the first See You Next Tuesday record. Of course the noisy nonsense is all over in about 15 manic minutes but it never gets tiring and most bands wish they could fit so many grooves into a single record. The band is actively touring around eastern Europe this summer so catch these crazy fuckers if at all possible. Facebook here. Bandcamp there. Enjoy.

grow. shine. wither. die.

Ted, Just Admit It...

I thought I'd switch gears real quick and upload what I feel is a rather important piece of out-of-print literature - the 1981 biography by Ted Bundy's ex-girlfriend Elizabeth Kloepfer. Under the pseudonym Elizabeth Kendall (she was also known as Beth Archer or Meg Anders) she writes an absolutely compelling diatribe about living with someone who was at the time brutally murdering innocent women while appearing as an absolute snapshot of normalcy. He's as insecure and flawed as any of us - likes Mickey's malt liquor of all things! The book follows their relationship through the 1976 Utah trial for Carol DaRonch's attempted kidnapping and ends with some sporadic contact after his escape to Florida. Kloepfer is incredibly honest - her struggles with alcohol alone are almost worthy of a novel - much less living with a serial killer. Essential reading. I also included an audio recording of Ted Bundy's Fatal Addiction interview with evangelist James Dobson the day before his execution, January 23, 1989. Ted is annoyingly self-serving and indirectly absolves himself under the guise of blaming pornography and slasher movies for his actions. Yeah, I know he is scared of dying in 24 hours but have some self respect and take some ownership for shit's sake. There's a great moment where a phone rings in the background and he pauses. Nope, it's not the governor motherfucker, execution is still on schedule. He doesn't answer any specific murder questions - primarily 12-year old Kim Leach which is frustrating (he claims he "can't really talk about that right now") which would have satisfied the whole reason for the interview - instead he kind of tries to make it seem like the pain is a burden he's carrying. Fucked up shit. Enjoy.

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You're A Fucking Pussy

Man, I coulda sworn I had posted this snotty lil' EP ages ago but I'll just go ahead and blame the sixteen thousand Miller Lite's I've drank since its 2010 release for my lapse in memory. Sounding more akin to thrashy metalcore than straightforward hardcore, this Goshen, IN quartet blasts through six wonderfully anti-PC tracks in 12 frantic minutes. Rounding the token offensive bases from the requisite "Commit Suicide" to "Vegan Faggot" (my favorite) and "Beat Women" you can't help but smirk at the chorus to "Never Sober"... "Drink! Drink! Drink! Drink you faggot!" It doesn't seem like the band has done a whole lot since releasing this minor masterpiece but they still have a facebook page that gets updated once in a while. Enjoy.

Thrash Til Death

Lyrics Of Fury

Man, talk about shooting your wad too early. While undeniably an old-school classic let's be honest, the first two tracks of Eric B. & Rakim's sophomore LP Follow The Leader are the only real reason to own this album. The title single and "Microphone Fiend" (with arguably the most copied groove in rap history) are two of the tightest hip-hop songs ever - the kind of shit you'd give to an alien if you had to explain to it what rap was. Now as far as Eric B. & Rakim go, I was already a pretty big fan of theirs (primarily from the epic seven-minute "madness mix" of "Paid In Full" off the Colors soundtrack) so when the gangster-esque "Follow The Leader" video debuted on Yo MTV Raps! (yeah white suburbia!) I was fucking hooked. With a voice like no other, Rakim was easily one of the smoothest and most recognizable rappers of his time and while I never thought Eric B. could stop traffic as a scratch artist that guy could cut some fucking samples together. The rest of the recordis listenable, if not terribly overwhelming. There are elements of "Lyrics Of Fury," "The R" and "Musical Massacre" that I kinda like every now and then but pretty much I wore out my cassette rewinding the first ten minutes of side A over and over again. Enjoy.

School Boy Crush

Whatever happened to Robert Deathrage?

I gotta admit, there is little out that offends me. Save for people killing kids and shit like that I am pretty much a drunk cynical curmudgeon when it comes to general human misery.  Still, there is something about the Meat Shits that actually irritates (dare I say "bothers"?) me twenty-five years after excitedly discovering them on Ax/ction Records' epic Apocalyptic Convulsions 10" comp LP. At the time it was their image more than the "music". Sick-ass song titles plastered on DIY 7" paper sleeves slathered together with shitty xeroxes of all the 1-900 ads you'd find in the back pages of Hustler. In a pinch you could almost jerk off to a Meat Shits record (for some reason the C-grade blowjob queen on the back of Make Me Cum was weirdly attractive but I digress...) Regardless, the schtick got old real fast; enticing song titles like "Golden Shower Girls" and "Gallons Of Cum" were just simple blasts of nonsense after an overly long VHS-ripped porno sample. So when lead man Robert Deathrage got his act together, reinvented the band and destroyed the scene with 1993's watershed Ecstasy Of Death, I figured he was doing what Anal Cunt was then aspiring to - leaving the 2-second noise blasts to the Germans and creating a legitimate noise/grind hybrid while not totally dismissing the noisy past. Without a doubt it worked on Ecstasy. Still, that CD red-flagged Rob's strangely over-aggressive (obsessive?) campaign against AIDS and gays. What followed over the years were such gems as Homosexual Slaughter and Sniper At The Fag Parade - completely derivative of the trend-setting Ecstasy but sadly lacking the innocence of the debut full-length and sounding just... hateful. I dunno, while I'm to this day still a fan of some really ultra-mysoginistic, homophobic, xenophobic, anti-Semitic musicians like GG, AxCx, Cunt Sludge, and their ilk; none of these bands were so intensely committed to being anti-something as the Meat Shits were towards gays (and women as well which is a totally inconsistent diatribe but this ain't no PhD thesis debate...) and without a fucking lick of redeeming self-serving humor about it. So where am I going with this rambling post? To me it is amazing that the strange life of Robert Deathrage and the various internet theories about his floating through the California metal scenes with a wrath of fucking everyone over behind him aren't up for more discussion. Shit, the guy has photos of himself with his newborn godchild for Christ's sake on his oddly still-working myspace page. Yet evidently he disappeared from the scene because he had cancer? At the same time Seth Putnam went into a coma? Who knows if we will ever hear again from the little brown noise metal outfit straight outta Modesto, CA but it is interesting that these days I'd rather listen to the kinda annoying shit noise blasts I heard back in the day then the "real" hatecore/grindcore band they/he eventually became. I'll take the former... à la their 1990 quasi-epic Genital Infection...

Reach Out And Fuck Someone

Vinnie Paz & Stoupe The Enemy Of Mankind

Alright fuckers - done with the lo-rent death metal - at least for a post or two. Straight outta Philly comes the first hip-hop record since 1994's Niggamortis that has raised a dry smile on my mug since the golden age of rap ended. Sounding a heckuva lot like the Gravediggaz (especially "Books Of Blood"), Jedi Mind Tricks keep it lo-fi without completely sounding like they are recording on a couple of 18-D battery ghetto blasters. Some of the "guest" rappers are a tad weak - who the fuck are the Lost Children Of Babylon? - but it all works overall. While the duo would eventually focus on more politically-charged shit, this first LP is a refreshing amalgam of science, history and tongue-twisting pop culture vocabulary. Amazingly the guys, while changing members over the decades, have stayed completely independent throughout - selling their records with a heard-earned swap-meet mentality, and their success speaks for itself. En-fucking-joy.

Last Straw

Choke Puke Slap Fuck

Banal brutal death grind from Budapest done exactly by the numbers yet for some weird reason it's not only listenable but mildly catchy for all the 10 minutes of their 2008 demo. Interestingly, the trio inexplicably re-recorded Meat as Meat 2.0 two years later - the latter sounds absolutely terrible in comparison (you can download it for free here) which goes to show a flashy production studio does little for a grind band's groove. Still, the guys eventually managed to release a full-length in 2013 which sounds exactly like you would expect it to... and their facebook page hasn't been updated since...

Letöltés

Local plug...

Chompin' on my Tel-Star burrito the other week at a personal fave mexi-cali joint I was intrigued by a flyer promoting a weekday show by some cooly-monikered band called Hoboknife. Unfortunately the gig was cancelled the day it was supposed to happen but my slightly piqued interest was enough for me to search out their bandcamp page. Amazingly it was worth the visit. A weird death/heavy/black metal amalgam that sounds fresh from the late 90's, Hoboknife play "drunken black-and-roll straight off the rails" (per their facebook bio) and while it's nothing I'd ever kill for it was nice to hear an active RVA band that isn't metalcore. Enjoy.

Straight off the Greyhound

My Name Is Really Mud...

No, this isn't a Pork Soda post, it's instead the then-customary early 90's remix single by NYC crossover legends Prong. Hot off the heels of their so-so Prove You Wrong LP, they grabbed Killing Joke (and future Prong) bassist Paul Raven (then a competent programmer in his own right) and Foetus mastermind J. G. Thirlwell for a better-than-most maxi-CD single. Interestingly, as opposed to the bonus stuff Faith No More was releasing at the time, the remixes aren't that much of a variant - they still basically sound like the original, only much more "industrial" - no doubt an effort to cash in on the up-and-coming genre spearheaded by Ministry at the time. Interestingly, a few of the songs work a lot better in their remix version than on the source record - without a doubt both "Prove You Wrong" cuts are far superior. The dry smile inducer on this one is a "previously unreleased" cover of Music Machine/Alice Cooper's "Talk Talk". Sadly though, it just makes the admittedly subpar originals simply sound soooo much better. Enjoy.

Fuzzbuster Harm Dub Safety Xanax