It's Impossible To Keep A Body Count

11 minutes of sheer blitzkreig mania from this well-bearded Northhampton, UK trio. Their obscure 2008 EP features five assaultive blasts of tight-ass old-school grindcore before wrapping up with the 5-minute sludgecore epic "Throne Of Bile." While some of the songs are over before you even realize it the record beckons repeat listens without even trying. Since One In One Out the band has released a shitload of material - thankfully it's the same old crazy shit - check out their bandcamp page here.

Scissors

Bryn Mawr Stomp

A friend and fellow Ween fan recently brought up this gig and I thought I'd pull it from the archives and revisit it in its entirety. Recorded at The Point, a small quaint coffeehouse in equally tiny Bryn Mawr, PA (population 4000 which is mostly college students). Sadly the establishment closed in 2005 but this gig, recorded in 2002, captures a very intimate, mostly acoustic evening with Ween at a time they were near their musical peak. Quebec was a year from release, their creative spirits were flowing and hearing the band jam some of the old "hits" broken down slow and lazy is a real treat. The small crowd yells out request after request (I seriously think they cover Ween's entire catalog) and the band tries to keep up with a smile - managing to belt out some obscurities like "Right To The Ways And The Rules Of The World" and "Scrape The Mucus Off My Brain". My favorite is a very personal version of "If You Could Save Yourself (You'd Save Us All)" - Gener sings the lyrics over his own strumming acoustic - a really nice take of one of my favorite songs by the band. The encore is great - the mellowness of "Birthday Boy" played acoustic really enhances the love song it's supposed to be. "El Camino" is awesome as well, they somehow morph "cuando, cuando" into "White Rabbit" - fucking hilarious. And they play "Someday" twice to boot. A great gig from a truly legendary band. Someone actually had both a video of it and the good sense to upload it to YouTube - check it out.

Someday

Long Live The Cock

It's tough to top your debut album, especially when that auspicious release is Fresh White Reeboks Kickin Your Ass but San Fran supergroup Nigel Pepper Cock did exactly that with The New Way. Released just a year after their inaugural EP, their one and only full-length is chock full of old-school nods (Black Sabbath and Crass) as well as simple fucking sludgepunk slam. My favorite song is the metalcore-ish metal "Respect" - it seems so wonderfully unrehearsed and screams for a bloody mosh pit. The rest of it is a psychotically manic joyride of noise - I guarantee you will be pleasantly surprised by this one.

Jailbait Not Allowed

The Last Will

Recorded back in late 2013, the mighty Argentinian sludge quartet Asilo destroy on this three-way split with fellow countrymen Uroboros (death metal) and El Caos Reptante (Electric Wizard-ish doom). While these five songs showed up on the band's respectable full-length Comunión last year, this live studio recording absolutely blows each of them away. Totally raw as fuck, lead singer Gabriel sounds absolutely fucking insane, screaming like a coked-up banshee against Platino's muted Otesanek-ish background growls. I've probably heard six different versions of "Geografías" and this is my favorite - the rambling dirge at the end is both hilarious and heavy. Enjoy some of the best double-bass guitar sludge I've heard in a long while...

No Nacho

Feces And Blood

Quietly released among a glut of posthumous GG Allin releases, it's surprising how Violent Beatings stayed under the radar considering it's got the most legitimately unreleased material since the ol' scumfuc OD'd twenty years ago. And for once it's not repackaged C&W acoustic nonsense, it's a bunch of recordings featuring guitarist Mark Sheehan (of Troubled Troubador and Illegitimate Kids (in)famy). Up first is a completely remastered version of GG's Murder Junkies 7" - the music is culled straight from the 1991 session master and is significantly rawer than what you heard on the You Give Love A Bad Name re-release. While not my favorite GG recording, I really dig "Bacteria Of The Soul" - a cool-ass rambling dirge which makes it all worthwhile. Additionally, the CD features some fantastic demo stuff recorded in the late 80's. Hitting rock bottom, GG took up Sheehan's offer to record in Lowell, MA during the hot summer of '88; the sessions were later partially released as Suicide Sessions. If you enjoyed the bleak rawness of Sessions then you will absolutely love this. While it's not everything they recorded, most of the faves are there... "Drug Whore", "Cornhole Lust", etc, etc. Absolutely fucking crazy. For completists out there (if my hazy memory serves me right), Ax/ction Records did packaged the entire Suicide Sessions demo as a DIY cassette-only release deceptively titled Scumfucs Live '84. If anyone has a copy out there please get in touch!

Kiss Me In The Gutter

We Don't Want You Here

After the Arghoslent post the other month I decided to revisit the lone Mudoven CD in my collection, 1998's Truth And Tragedy. Content-wise it's exactly what you'd expect from the guitarist of Vaginal Jesus; music-wise it's rather... thin. Mudoven is a one-man band with Jim Crow fulfilling the vocal and drum machine roles as well as pluck the six-string. The lyrics are kinda funny in a über-offensive sorta way but any credibility is lost in the ridiculous overproduction - an overdub nightmare that is mastered so high on treble it (intentionally?) seems the antithesis of bass-heavy hip-hop. If only it could have been recorded with a full band on some lo-fi analog cassette - the muddy roughness would have really added something. While miserably racist, it's all so over the top you get the idea that (as with VxJx) it's an ultra-bad taste joke done simply to piss off the people who make an effort to be pissed of about stuff like this. Of course there are back-woods rednecks who take this shit completely seriously which shows just how retarded those slack-jawed hicks really are.

Tri-State Terror

Music Sucks

20 years after they invented a musical genre with their inaugural 88 Song EP, Mike Mahan, Seth Putnam and Tim Morse dusted off the cobwebs and re-recorded the twenty-minute blast of blur that started their (in)famous ride as one of the most polarizing bands in heavy music history. Per Mr. Putnam:

"Since 2008 was the 20th anniversary of Anal Cunt, we got the original lineup back together and only did shows with this lineup all year and only did songs from the 1988-1990 period. This CD was recorded the way original Anal Cunt stuff should be recorded. We just borrowed a recorder from someone, pressed play and didn't stop until we were done. We didn't stop the recorder to take any breaks, or re-record mistakes or anything gay like that. What you get here is over 21 minutes of pure, raw Anal Cunt style blurcore. We tried recording it a couple of days earlier on some gay computer recorder which Tim assured me would be fine, but ended up sounding like Richard Simmons trying to pick which Polyphonic Spree song he wanted to hear on the jukebox at a gay bar. So we threw that recording away, and tried again 2 days later with a different recorder that Tim borrowed from someone else. It sounds exactly the way the original lineup of Anal Cunt is supposed to sound, like a ferocious, violent, holocaust. The only thing that sucks about it a little is the little recorder couldn't handle my vocals like it should, so it's a little weaker than it sounded in the room when we recorded it, but it came out good enough. If you like the sound of Anal Cunt's Another E.P. then you'll love this - because it is much heavier, and more like an audio sledgehammer to your face.  If you didn't like the sound of Another E.P. then go inject some more of Bruce Vilanch's cum into your veins, faggot."

I'm fine with admitting I was a pretty hardcore A.C. fan back in the day, I was one of those sorry souls who slapped down three bucks at Newbury Comics every time they released a new 7" even though I knew it was going to be the exact same power chord noisecore. Sure, the 7MON split was over-produced, Another E.P. was under-produced, the Meat Shits split interspersed some surf rock riffs and the Unplugged E.P. was, well, unplugged, but all in all it was the same ol' noisy stuff. So at least I knew what I was gonna get with 110 Song CD. Not quite a feedback-laden lo-fi assault as Another E.P. (my personal fave from the blur era), it's still a respectable throwback to the good ol' days by guys who were pushing 40 at the time for chrissakes. Tight and fucking insane as ever, it's too bad there will probably never again be a band who randomly mashed two dozen riffs together and made a career recording it over and over again. Enjoy.

Wicked Sick

Everglade

I'm sure L7 would be tickled fucking clitoris pink to be sandwiched between two of the most misogynistic bands in musical history (spoiler alert... Anal Cunt post up next) but I've had this fucking song in my head for like the last two days and figured it needed some recognition. Solid sludgy grunge from a 50% attractive girl group (was that the typical ratio or what?), for some weird reason I am convinced it sounds like a Go-Go's single played at 33 rpm. I actually had the whole Bricks Are Heavy album this song sleazed from but it was quasi-reluctantly sold in the broke-ass post-college CD purge of 1994. Still, "Pretend We're Dead" is easily the feminine foursome's finest four minutes, a strangely catchy post-metal dirge that would have been a lot stronger without the endlessly looped whispery vocal overdubs. Sure, it's terribly overproduced for the grungy/indie attitude they're trying to portray but at the least it's still four women rocking out (and shit, sometime vocalist Suzi Gardner offered the hottie background vox on Black Flag's "Slip It In" to which I probably/definitely jerked off once or twice to). As far as this import Japanese single goes, it's worth a listen - accompanying five live tracks (two solid from Bricks and three weak from 1990's forgettable Smell The Magic) is "I Used To Love Him," a barely humorous parody of Guns 'N' Roses "I Used To Love Her" (was the idiotic furor over that lame-ass song still relevant in '92?) and the only original B-side from Bricks, "Lopsided Head". I'm surprised I wrote as much as I did about this CD-single, I think the funniest thing now that I'm listening to it is how much whomever chick is singing on "I Used To Love Him" sounds exactly like Axl Rose. Shit I gotta go to bed. Enjoy.

C'mon C'mon C'mon C'mon

Allin Autobiography

How else to start off the year right then with some essential literature penned by punk rock's preeminent Public Animal #1? Introducing the closest thing to a memoir about the infamous scumfuc, GG's autobiographical "America's Favorite Son." Written much like a schizophrenic diary (Allin has the annoying habit of casually traversing from the first to third person) it is somewhat difficult to read at times - the single-spaced typewritten pages are murder on the eyes (as is GG's antipathy for punctuation). Regardless, it is still a fascinating book, a must-have for any serious fan. Spanning from early childhood to his 1989 arrest in Ann Arbor, the stories are both hilarious and sobering. GG names names and doesn't censor the details for anyone's benefit, even his own. The Jabbers stuff is fantastic - the stories of the band struggling to stay together once GG decided to do his own thing are a real treat. My only complaint with "America's Favorite Son" is the lack of detail once GG began to devolve in the late 80's. Of course this is easily explained by the increase in his boozing and blackouts during that time but I wish more than a couple pages were dedicated to the recording of Freaks, Faggots Drunks & Junkies (heck, Suicide Sessions is mentioned only in passing). GG must've eventually sold his typewriter as the last 30 or so pages are handwritten (and I was complaining about the typewriter?) - I am happy to report that someone with a lot of patience has actually transcribed the entire book into a much more legible PDF format. And what a cover photo to boot. I included in the download file a few bonus PDFs. One is of a 1991 xeroxed press book distributed by Allin while he was floating around the country skirting parole. I got it via G-O-D from the excellent Media Christ blog who actually got his signed copy from Allin himself. A lot of the material we've seen before but it's still a cool compilation to peruse through. For completists out there, I also included a PDF of Evan Cohen's "I Was A Murder Junkie" to cover the last 5 months of GG's all-to-short life. So kick your feet up by the fire, grab yourself a steaming mug of Jim Beam and drift off into literary bliss.

Manchester Memoirs