Category Archives: Underground Metal

CARCASS “Reek of Putrefaction”

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CARCASS
Reek of Putrefaction
(Earache)
Available on CD, iTunes, AmazonMP3, eMusic and Spotify

Every time I make an effort to listen to this album, I have to admit one thing… it’s a hard listen. Not because of the music, the playing, or the guttural vocals (singing very polysyllabic lyrics straight out of medical textbooks). But because of hwo the album was recorded.

Granted, Earache in their early days – and this is one of their early classic releases – didn’t have a whole hell of a lot of money to spend on recording costs. But for their first serious go-round in a recording studio – one that was going to be reproduced on vinyl and then on compact disc – Carcass and Earache Records got a little stub, never mind just the short end of the stick, when it came to getting a decent sound.

Apparently, whoever the engineer was at the cheap studio Earache had hired was far from prepared to record a band like Carcass, who were one of the earliest bands to use downtuned guitars, blast beats, and – on this first album, at least, some deliberately pitch-shifted vocals – as part of their modus operandi. The band, at least according to Choosing Death, tried several times to remix the album before band and label threw up their hands and were forced to release it as is.

The bad recording and mixing notwithstanding, Reek of Putrefaction  ended up a death metal and grindcore classic anyway. Hey, bad sound didn’t hurt the reputation of the music on the originally released mix of Iggy And The Stooges’s Raw Power, and a couple of decades later Iggy would get the chance to give the album a remix befitting the album’s title. Barring factors like the recently reunited band or the still-venerable label being reluctant to do a remix, or the original multi-tracks being either unusable or non-existent, I don’t see why not, unless the dodgy sound on the album is part of it’s charm.

WORMROT “Dirge”

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WORMROT
Dirge
(Earache)
Available on CD, vinyl, iTunes, AmazonMP3, eMusic, Spotify, and direct from the label

I’ve been playing this album a lot lately – especially in the car.

I’ve had this album for a little over a year, spurred initially by Earache initially offering the entire 25-song album as a free download, and have since bought both the CD (with the bonus DVD) and the iTunes version with the ten bonus tracks (At $5.99 for the whole album on iTunes, it was a lot cheaper than just buying the other ten tracks at 99 cents apiece). Outside of checking out Napalm Death, Exit-13, Agorophobic Nosebleed, and Anal Cunt, I never delved full-on into grindcore, but this album and this band – a bass-less three-piece from Singapore – has gotten me more and more curious about the genre.

Musically, all of the songs on Dirge are abrupt, crushing, and – in defiance of their brevity – complete statements. And they are indeed songs with distinct riffs, verses, choruses, and breakdowns – not ridiculous blurs like early Anal Cunt (granted, in AxCx’s case, deliberately ridiculous) or drum-machine-driven insanity-fests like Agorophobic Nosebleed. Some grindcore bands tend to be a bit on the sloppy side unintentionally – not Wormrot. These three guys had their shit together before they even went into the studio, and it shows. (The DVD reveals that the instrumental tracks were recorded in one day-long session; vocalist/cover artist Arif recorded the vocals later at home on his laptop… econo all the way, as Mike Watt would put it.) The production is clean enough to deliver the clarity needed without making the band sound diluted – in fact, they sound even heavier.

Would this be a good entry into grindcore music for the novice listener? I would say absolutely yes. Last time I checked, Earache was still offering the free download of this album – don’t be surprised if it spurs you to buy the CD or record.

SUNN O))) “Monoliths and Dimensions”

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This overview is dedicated to essential brother Ray Mescallado, who I know is a big fan of this album and this type of music…

SUNN O)))
Monoliths and Dimensions
(Southern Lord)
Available on CD, 180g double LP, iTunes, AmazonMP3, eMusic, and Spotify.

 I put this album in my Top 10 list for 2009 at TGML, but I never actually reviewed it. Now that I have this less restrictive single-concept sister blog, I have an excuse to write about it.

The skinny: Sunn O))) is primarily the duo of Stephen O’Malley and Greg Anderson, former bandmates in both Thorr’s Hammer and Burning Witch who, one day after both bands were but memories, decided to get together one day in a room with their guitars and a bunch of amplifiers turned up to levels that make Nigel Tufnel look unplugged, and see what happened. What happened spurred on their first recording, The Grimm Robe Demos, and a rather unique sound that encompassed black metal, drone music, ambient music, and anything else they could sneak into their sonic stew. Much of their output isn’t exactly easy listening, but their most recent studio release, Monoliths and Dimensions, is the perfect starting point for investigating the band’s modus operandi. It’s literally their most experimental – and accessible – release to date. The album consists of four long tracks – given the almost experimental classical leanings, one could look at this album as a four-movement symphony.

“Agartha” starts off with the typical massed guitars playing long, drowning, overtoning powerchords. A few minutes in several more instruments – primarily orchestral strings, the lower octaves of a grand piano, and sometime Mayhem vocalist Atilla Csihar kicking some rather bizarre and esoteric spoken word about ships, clouds, and Eskimos. By the time two thirds of the song have passed, the guitars have been mixed out of the sound spectrum, replaced by droning horns, upright bass strings being scraped by the backs of bows, and Csihar’s vocals. With less than two minutes left in the song, even the horns have disappeared, leaving behind Csihar’s spoken word and the sounds of water and wind.

“Big Church [Megszentségteleníthetetlenségeskedéseitekért]” starts off with twenty seconds of a Viennese women’s choir before the guitars, accompanied by equally droning organ, interrupt things. The guitars rear back a little to let the choir back in, one guitar arpeggiating whole notes along with the choir while another comes in and out with powerchords. The guitars start to feedback alongside some Gregorian-chant-influenced male vocals before all of that is interrupted by a single church bell. Then the standard Sunn O))) superpowerchords come back in to start the whole cycle a second time.

“Hunting & Gathering (Cydonia)” begins with very tinny, faded out, guitar playing, sounding almost like a broken speaker. Suddenly, a switch seems to get flipped and everything sounds like it should be sounding. Csihar is back, kicking a more musical vocal (well, about as musical as his vocals on Mayhem’s De Miisterias Dom Sathanas) over O’Malley’s and Anderson’s busy riffing during what could be considered the verse part. A brass section comes in for the choruses, playing a dark and foreboding – yet still major key sounding – fanfare.

“Alice” – said to have been written about or dedicated to the late jazz keyboardist/spiritualist Alice Coltrane (John’s widow) – closes out things in epic fashion. We hear the reverb of Sunn O)))’s guitars, which itself gets drowned out by a lone guitar strumming a semi-gentle, yet prominent chord, joined almost immediately afterward by a bass and then the orchestral players. Like the beginning of the album, the guitars are eventually mixed out of the picture – while orchestral elements more suited to a Disney movie, like harps and flutes take over the droning instrument duties.

Writing about this album,  one is left with a loss for words when trying to describe it. As experimental as it may sound, Monoliths and Dimensions should definitely be experienced by serious music lovers, if they haven’t experienced it yet already.

FLAGITIOUS IDIOSYNCRASY IN THE DILAPIDATION self-titled LP

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FLAGITIOUS IDIOSYNCRASY IN THE DILAPIDATION
self-titled
(Six Weeks)
Available on LP
Two grindcore reviews in a week’s time? I’m sure longtime readers of my main blog are wondering what the hell I’m thinking considering I’ve never mentioned grindcore there, ever. However, I recently came across this band while doing some random surfing, saw a live video of their first American live performance on a blog somewhere, and started searching around for their stuff, coming across this LP. Yeah, vinyl and no easily obtainable CD (save for an edition of this album released in the Czech Republic, of all places) to speak of. I’m really pushing it, aren’t I?

Well, this band caught my attention because they’re an all-girl grindcore band from Japan. OK, so they have at least that in common with Morning Musume and SCANDAL, but that’s about it. Now we’re really running the gamut here, ladies and gentlemen.

As I mentioned when I wrote about the posthumous Anal Cunt CD the other day, grindcore isn’t for everybody. But this album and this band might be a hell of a lot more accessible-sounding than most. That doesn’t mean they’re lightweight – these girls rage. Listen to the vocals of lead singer Makiko and you’ll wonder how those sounds – the alternating harsh shrieks and guttural Cookie Monster growls – are coming out of that little body. And the band is unbelievably tight musically – they have their chops, and the energy is very tightly controlled – no one is going offbeat and everything is well rehearsed and well played. F.I.D. can also throw in (relatively) slower grooves when called for like on

Too many wanna-be grindcore bands think they can just make any fucked-up noise and think they can be the next Napalm Death or Wormrot. It doesn’t work that way, folks. Flagitious Idiosyncrasy in the Dilapidation is a great example of how to do grindcore right – the fact that they’re four girls from Japan will probably throw some people off, but once they start playing, they’ll own your ears.

A.C. “The Old Testament 1988-1991 AxCx”

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ANAL CUNT
The Old Testament 1988-1991 AxCx
(Relapse)
Producer: Seth Putnam (compilation)
Available on CD, iTunes, AmazonMP3, Spotify

Some grindcore acts are meant to be taken seriously (n.g. Napalm Death, Wormrot), some aren’t. And then there’s Anal Cunt, who for their whole career didn’t give a shit which was the case – even though that’s going to be a forever disputed point amongst anyone that’s ever caught an earful of them. My first exposure to them was cuts from their first widespread release Morbid Florist that appeared on the Relapse Records compilation Corporate Death – and I wasn’t sure what to think either, given that one of the cuts in question was a bizarre cover of EMF’s “Unbelievable” that went from grindcore blur to a rough replication of the original’s piano riff on guitar back to grindcore blur.

Prior to his untimely passing, lead vocalist Seth Putnam compiled all of his band’s pre-Morbid Florist recordings – most done at home on either a 4-track machine or a consumer-grade cassette recorder, save for a couple of exceptions, one notably bizarre – wrote up some extensive liner notes, and passed them on to Relapse Records. The liner notes were dated June 8, 2011. Three days later, a heart attack claimed him. He was 43 years old.

In AxCx’s early period, there were no niceties as song titles or even pre-planned songs – the band members were obviously capable of playing normally or otherwise they wouldn’t have been able to deliberately make such a bizarre racket in the first place.

Much of this had been reissued on CD before a couple of times, but for hardcore fans, the band’s original unreleased demo, one that hardcore AxCx fans knew of but hadn’t heard and had frequently pestered Seth for, is going to be the main reason for grabbing this – that and previous compilations of this period’s material are pretty much out of print physically. An irony: The band’s first unreleased demo was recorded on a four-track machine at home, but their more wisespread 44 Song Demo was recorded on Seth’s parents’s stereo in their living room.

The highlight of the compliation is the infamous 5,643 Song EP. The band went into a 16-track studio and recorded themselves onto one channel of the tape, doing a slew of half-improvised short songs, then repeated the process on the other 15 channels of the tape – then did it all over again a second time for the EP’s second side. Played as a whole, the whole sonic wash puts the likes of Merzbow to shame.

Music like this, even from an early period when the songs were deliberately made up on the spot and never titled, is not for most people. But if one is remotely curious about this stuff, its well worth exploring.