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