Never Dirty

Stuck in a shit ton of traffic while driving home from work these 8 minutes of gold randomly popped onto my iPod and kept my road rage at bay for the home stretch of I95. Mixed by old friend DJ Stew back in the late 90's, there's nothing here that would amaze any potential Q's out there, just a solid seamless medley of D.M.C. old-school hits. "My Adidas," "Sucker M.C.'s" and "Peter Piper" as well as some snippets from other classics. Relegated to weddings and cheesy bar mitzvahs, Stew left the disk jockey racket a long time ago. Enjoy.

Mostly Clean

Central Jersey Sludge

Very little out there on this sludgecore three-piece other than they seemed to be active around 2012 and even got a gig at the sadly defunct New Brunswick, NJ Alamo club. Which was dutifully recorded by someone no less! And here it is. Blasting a wall of lo-fi shit-Peavey-amp feedback-laden nonsense at the surely confused barflys, Thorn wallow through twenty minutes of respectable sludgecore. Lotsa screaming and shrieking and there are times it almost sounds like blur. I've also included the bands' three-song demo, recorded a month earlier sans vocals and lead guitar (possibly as show prep?) which show the guys as committed musicians who gave a shit about what was going on at the time. Three years later I'm sure the band has long since dissipated but hey, they accomplished more in a few short months than some idiots achieve over years.

I II III IV

Time For Sex

As I've rambled about before from this ol' soapbox, my favorite albums of Kool Keith's fucking epic discography are those conceived with Kutmasta Kurt. A long decade after the duo dropped Keith's ultimate Sex Style (here) comes an hour of outtakes and demos; shit that didn't make the final cut or was simply never made it out of demo status. To be honest, why? The shit rules. It is fucking awesome to hear Keith rapping his trademark dirty "do-do" freestyle over Kurt's absolutely minimal groove-heavy beats once again - by no means are these apologetic bottom-of-the-barrel scraps. Shit, the fact they came up with a token "skit" cements the fact that Sex Style should have been a double LP. Regardless, it is now with this album as a companion, discovering another cache of top-dollar Keith at his peak is simply money.

Oh. My. God. Girl.

Straight Outta Stockholm

Something a little different-sounding from my usual posts - and tough to actually describe. While their bandcamp handle is "dvaladoom" don't be fooled, this Swedish 5-piece plays a pleasantly unique smorgasbord of post punk, lo-fi and croony, arty indie rock (they evidently posit themselves after 80's Swede alt rockers Broder Daniel whom I've never heard so the reference is completely lost on me). I present their 2013 release Vanföreställningar (Delusions), a 4-song EP that skirts across a large chunk of the musical spectrum. Most of the songs have two separate parts, one somewhat gloomy and bluesy followed by a more traditional R 'n' R finale. Guess which part I like better. If I have one complaint it's having no idea what the vocalist is wailing in any of the songs (à la watching a foreign movie without subtitles) but I can't really point too much of a finger since most of the music I listen to is abject screaming and gurgles anyway. The band appears to still be active (and poised to drop a full-length LP) via the usual social media pages so check 'em out (fb/bc).

Harborside

Lo-fi lovers unite...

As raw as they come these days, the Kent, UK three-piece calling themselves Sorg stumbled late into my bandcamp search results long after I had expected to discover anything worthwhile. Vaguely reminding me of the Fuckheads and/or any other bunch of pissed-off guys projecting their pent-up rage towards the world/job/girlfriend/parent/whatever via a musical instrument, the shit is pissed off and groovy to listen to. The band claims to play a mixture of black metal/sludge/powerviolence/hardcore and I'd agree with genres 2 and 4 - I'm bereft to to find the black metal connection here and I still don't really know what the fuck "powerviolence" is. My favorite song is easily "Sludge Cunt" (Yes! The best song name in the world!), a tune that totally reminds me of Loinen or Usko or some weird black Finnish sludgecore band. Am I digressing? Absolutely worth a listen. 

The Fall

Burning Inside

Man, way back in 1989 Al Jourgensen must have been having the time of his life. Not only was his industrial monster Ministry blowing up stereos around the world, he was involved in like ten other bands outputting EPs, LPs and singles with astonishing speed. One of the better records dropped during that time was the first 12" single from The Mind Is A Terrible Thing To Taste, "Burning Inside." While the titular song gets little more than a minute or so of "remix" treatment (a few extra loops of beats here and there, nothing terribly different - same with Side B's "Thieves"), the real star of the release is an "arrangement" of the Skinny Puppy song "Smothered Hope". Originally found on their 1984 Remission EP, Jourgensen culled and mixed his version from a 1988 live Chicago performance. Ironically, Jourgensen met Skinny Puppy vocalist Nivek Ogre at the Wax Trax Studios while cutting the track which would eventually be PTP's "Show Me Your Spine" single for RoboCop.

"...I was doing a song for the RoboCop soundtrack as PTP, when Ogre walked in. I get pretty psychotic in the studio, and I didn't even know who he was, but somebody said he was some singer from somewhere, so I just said 'hey man, make yourself useful, get in here and sing.'"

And so a friendship was born. Anyways, nice to hear some not-so-common Ministry from the earlier days and longer versions of two of my favorite Taste songs can't be beat. Enjoy.

So What?

Contemplating Death

Wow, it's been a while since I've posted anything "heavy" on the ol' blog (much less posted anything at all but that's a different story) so a big welcome to the creepy month of October with a 38-track slab of good ol' pathological goregrind to ruin your day. I gotta admit I was pretty excited when I heard the opening "Symphony For A Casket Full Of Nematodes" - a brutal lo-fi goregrind neo-classic with a solid riff and great blasts of noise and gurgles. Unfortunately the rest of the record doesn't hold up quite as strongly. Imagine really early cassette-deck Regurgitate (a la Concrete Human Torture) and you'll get the idea. Occasionally a RGTE-esque riff will really stand out ("Anatomophysiological Deterioration" for one) but there is a lot of slogging through the swamp until you hit the satisfactory closer "Enter The Realm Of Cadaver... Dissection." I really prefer the slower grooves over the blast beat nonsense (which ultimately becomes terribly tiring) and there's enough variation between the nearly forty 1-minute tracks to keep Stages Of Decomposition listenable. The duo behind Thanatopsis includes Neto from the forgettable Brazilian gorenoise outfit HxAxSx and Pelle  from the equally obscure (and I'm sure just as unpleasant) Swedish one-man grindshow Shitfaced. I'm actually curious as to whether the two guys made the trans-global flights to record together or if this was a collaborative email/snail mail effort. Either way it absolutely blows away anything either of them have done in the past and there are some other splits and comps featuring the band out there waiting for you to check out...

Play Possum

Space Spotted Deer

Inspired by (or should I say riding on the coat-tails of) the should-be-more-praised I Hate The 90s comes the second record by South Korean grunge lords Noizegarden. Slavish Soundgarden fanboy moniker aside, the music sounds exactly like what you'd expect from an Asian bandwagon band jumping into the fray five years after the style they so fervently revere has departed for the cut-out bin. Still, aside from my deadpan (and terribly jaded) historical assumptions, But Not Least is a fucking solid LP from guys who obviously enjoyed what they were playing (are you listening, Jonathan Davis???) and sound more like what I wish Badmotorfinger actually ended up being. It's easy imagining guitarist/founder 윤병주 strumming a pristine 7-string Ibanez through tracks like "I Do Not Want Anymore" with a big fucking smile. His guitar work is effortless and almost sounds like Slash as he noodles his way up and down the fret with a sluggish confidence - really impressive. Sure, lead singer 박건 is a lot more melodic then the Chris Cornell-ish wailing you'd come to expect with a band like this but simply imagine Cobain singing for Soundgarden and I think you'll get the idea. There's some great feedback manipulation on a couple tunes which would never had made it into a Sub Pop release and while they were probably a decade too late to make it on this side of the hemisphere it's still a rocking 57 minutes. Enjoy.

Another Temptation

The Old Style

I consider myself a pretty big early-era Beastie Boys fan so I was surprised as shit to stumble upon this bootleg claiming to feature demo tracks from the trio's watershed 1986 LP Licensed To Ill. Jaded from decades of shitty boots I didn't expect much but once "Rhymin' & Stealin'" hit the speakers it was like welcoming an old friend back home. Sure the mixes are rough and the CD quality is marginal but man it is fun hearing semi-alternate versions of the record's time-tested classics. Featuring two so-so deleted songs "I'm Down" (a Beatles cover, 'natch) and "Scenario" - the real treat are the demos. While most of the songs are basically the same they are clearly mixed differently and, how can I say, heavier (especially "No Sleep Till Brooklyn"). "Rhymin' & Stealin" now ends with a since-censored "I smoke my crack and I'm rhymin' & stealin'..." "Fight For Your Right" has a whole additional verse (!) tacked on at the end, "Hold It Now, Hit It" wraps up differently. While it would be great if this was an actual leaked demo of what Licensed was originally intended to be, I've since read that Blue Moon Records (or whoever really cut this together) compiled some demos of tracks that were altered after the fact, added some deleted songs and filled in the gaps with slightly modified album cuts to approximate an "almost was" record. Regardless of the history it's still a cool listen. And I hear there's a Paul's Boutique demo bootleg floating around out there as well. Stay tuned.

Time To Get Ill

The MTV star that never was...

Over the last couple days I spliced together a video for one of my favorite GG Allin songs. "Cornhole Lust" off of the ever-so-lovely Suicide Sessions. Check it out here.

Update 11/18/21: YouTube deleted my original video because I spliced in a few seconds of 80's porno clips, so I re-edited to include some classic gore segments and the video is probably more brutal now than it was originally. Yeah censorship!!