V8 - Luchando Por El Metal (1983)

I've written a few pieces on my admiration for various Central and South American metal bands and the manner in which they could absorb the severity of their circumstances into their music, transmuting it into an extremity paralleled by few other artists before or since. Bands like Parabellum, Herpes, and Hadez all churned out some of the most vicious, atonal, bomb-blast anti-music ever commited to tape but I would hate to imply that all the brutality of authoritarian regimes, drug-fuled corruption, and some of the bloodier moments of Cold War spillover necessarily forced musicians into the realms of quasi-listenable discordance. There were antecedents, unique for their time and place but not really remembered for the boundary pushing of their harsher followers.  

V8 is one such band. They're widely believed to be Argentina's first metal band and it's not hard to pick out what they were attempting. Their first album, 1983's Luchando Por El Metal (Fighting For Metal – for those unversed in Spanish) almost seems a sort of missing link between late NWOBHM and early speed metal, but whereas the former genre was comprised of bands who tended to release a killer EP or two and then either fall apart or make an album consisting mainly of shitty filler material and the latter focused more on technical ability and falsetto vocals, Luchando Por El Metal is rock solid and stocked front to back with well-written catchy tunes, almost punk-ish in their rawness, not a million miles removed from a rougher Kill 'Em All (which was released four months later). 

My Spanish is a bit rusty, but from what I can tell V8's hatred of both society and hippies was surpassed only by their devotion to heavy metal (the introduction to “Parcas Sangrientas” gives way to the heavily accented shout of “HEAVY MET-AL!” in case there was any question or doubt where their alliegences lay). And it may be easy to have a laugh at the single-mindedness of it all except for two things: first, in 1979 Argentina was still a military dictatorship that had withstood decades of de facto civil war, withV8 forming during the most repressive era of that regime's rule, a time when rock music was banned and anybody performing it did so at their own peril – imprisonment and forced disappearances were the order of the day – making the act of being in a metal band one requiring a level of bravery most musicians would have trouble mustering; and second, the album fucking rules. It's a total ripper, a rager, a torpedo bonzer, and ass-pounder of the highest order. Anybody who claims to like awesome things and doesn't like this needs to take a good, long look at themselves in the mirror and try to figure out where their head's at.

V8 may have had some analogs in the Motörheads and Judas Priests of the world, but to say their music wasn't new or different not only isn't really the point, but it lays bare the cultural privelege at the heart of being able to denigrate the relevance of something because it's reminiscent of something else. V8 was new and different, at least in relation to their corner of the world, and their popularity there attests to the vacuum that they filled for the generation of people who needed something as bracing, cathartic, and anarchic as metal to be able to come to terms with a social structure so rigorously and vehemently opposed to the freer expressions of the human spirit. Also it fucking rules. 

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V8 - Luchando Por El Metal 

A Beginner's Guide To Ejaculating Everywhere.

Rising from the dollar bin like a coked-out phoenix clad in midriff-baring shirt and three days worth of stubble comes fucking Diamond Reo. Not to be confused with the country band whose name only varies by one letter (apparently this particular band took their name from the same automotive company that supplied the appellation for Reo Speedwagon), the group of lowlives in question came out of Pittsburgh in the early 70s, offered up a few albums, much of which was thoroughly forgettable Mott The Hoople knockoff bullshit, but in the middle managed the brilliant scum-rock sleaze of Dirty Diamonds.

Most of it's mid-tempo Rust Belt butt-rock of the sort that saw its apex between 1971 and 1974. Copious cowbell abuse propping up the basest of Mark Farner aspirations. The album's opener, “All Over You,” is about ejaculating (all over, as the title specifies) somebody. And while none of the other songs really get to that level of base dumbness, it definitely establishes the general tone of the album. Take “It's A Jungle Out There” - a tribute to the toughness necessary to survive the rough-and-tumble urban life, that sounds like a half-speed prophecy of “Welcome To The Jungle” both in riff and lyrical conceit and is especially funny considering none of these dudes look exactly like the kick-ass-and-take-names type. Or “Boys Will Be Boys,” a paean to dudes who do dude stuff with other dudes (possibly as homoerotic as I just made it sound, I dunno). A few tracks pick up the pace to something not a million miles removed from the NWOBHM that was congealing across the pond around the same time, but this had nothing to do with leather and spikes crowd singing about swords and dragons.

It's pure id music, all libido, adrenaline, and testosterone - subtlety (and shirts that cover the full torso) be damned. It ain't special but there's not much better for drinking a few six packs of Mickey's alone on the porch in the middle of the afternoon with all the doors open or changing your own oil or something. It's ridiculous as shit and twice as dumb but it's a fun listen, a regional anachronism, a time capsule from the era of quadrophonic sound and quaaludes. Turn the shit up and get dumb as fuck.

                                                                                     

"It on your face / It's in your hair / It's down your back / Girl, it's everywhere"

Total Summertime Superdistorto Good Time Destruction

So, a few beers deep last night, Cobras and I got into a trans-continental bout of posting a bunch of 70s protometal summer jams on Facebook.  I figured I could share some of that and put up a mix of shit like that I made a month or two ago for partying purposes.  It ain't comprehensive, it's poorly researched, and ignores things that most people like.  So yeah.  Just a smattering of proto-metal, meathead, scuzz rock fuzzbombs from the golden age of quaaludes and tube amps. 

1. Lucifer's Friend - Ride In The Sky
Best thing this fucking band ever did.  It's like if Zeppelin decided to skip the eunuch Viking war cry on "Immigrant Song" and throw on some bleating horns and Hammond organ. 

2. Randy Holden - Guitar Song
I decided to skip some of the bigger names in this style (Sabbath, Blue Cheer, etc.), and while Holden was a member of Blue Cheer for one album it'd be a mistake to overlook this one.  The question I have regarding this song relates to the title.  Aren't ALL Randy Holden songs guitar songs?  Least descriptive title ever.  Might as well have called it fucking "Music Song" or "Song With Structure" or something.


3. Cool Feet - Burning Desire
Fucking sick album from Luxembourg circa '76.  Apparently only 200 were pressed, so good luck ever finding an actual copy of this that doesn't cost about the same as a downpayment on a house in a respectable neighborhood with good schools and curbside recycling.  It's got everything though: tinny mid-fi production, harmonized guitars, broken English lyrics.  If you hate this you're an asshole.


4. Stray - Jericho
I love ANY song with a galloping beat.

5. Frijid Pink - Crying Shame
This band had a balance between gnarly overdriven fuzz stomp and some sorta-corny-but-sorta awesome AOR boogie slop.  Gotta love any heavy band that genuinely uses the phrase "golly gee" in the lyrics. 

6. Grannie - Saga of the Sad Jester
Apparently the Grannie LP is one of the most valuable records in the world.  Even the fucking repress sells for a cool hundo.  Can't say I get it.  A lot of it sounds like an anemic Wishbone Ash.  But this song is pretty cool, like an anemic Wishbone Ash in a good way.

7. the Scorpions - It All Depends
I know I said I was gonna stay away from bigger names, but this doesn't count.  The Scorpions circa the early '70s were a totally different beast than what they'd become later.  Even though it's the same members, it might as well be a separate fucking band.  This album and it's successor are killer.  Shame what they'd become.

8. Flower Travellin' Band - Kamikaze
The Japanese Sabbath, if one were inclined towards clumsy cross-cultural analogies that fall short of their intended purpose.  Most people would go with the "Satori" album, with good reason.  But this one sounds like it could've been an out-take from that record, so fuck it.  Excruciatingly goddamn killer band. 

9. Råg I Ryggen - Det Kan Väl Inte Vara Farligt
Fuck man these Swedes kill it.  This is for all the people (like me) who, when they hear the term "prog rock", just assume its gonna be a bunch of Guitar Center employees with 37-string guitars and pony tails. Definitely intricate musically, but that doesn't undermine the heaviness.

10. Titanic - Macumba
Same deal as the last song.  Yeah, it's proggy, but it's also got some heft to it.  And it's catchy as a motherfucker.  It would surprise me if this DIDN'T turn up sampled on a Kanye West song.

11. Captain Beyond - Raging River Of Fear
This album is fucking perfect.  More technically sophisticated than most heavy bands of the era, heavier than most technically sophisticated bands.  Proto-prog-metal with more than a small amount of Southern rock thrown in.

12. Baby Grandmothers - Somebody Keeps Calling My Name
Apparently, this band's claim to fame was supporting Hendrix during his '68 Swedish tour.  But pretty much every burnout old rock dude from this era has some story about opening for Hendrix, or learning some licks from him, or buying drugs for him.  So you know, grain of salt.  Still a good record.  It can get a little jammy, but they manage to tie it all together, feng shui-ing their shit with some weird-ass vocals.

13. Cindy Und Bert - Der Hund Von Baskerville
This totally fucking happened.
                                                                                
 Fuzz Bomb Apocalypse Summer Jam Series Vol. 1

Devil In The Metal

So it's been a while since I've put anything up here. I know I've been forsaking my Illcon responsibilities (Illcon-sibilities?) but I wanted to make sure whatever I came back with was solid. And nothing seemed to jump out at me. Yeah, there are some good metal albums and weird conspiracies out there, but I wanted something really cool.

I was at the thrift store a while ago and something presented itself to me. It's not the cool thing I was looking for at all, the opposite really. A book so shitty looking that I couldn't not buy it. I was struck at first by the title - “Devil In The Metal” - along with a pentagram (though not inverted as most Satanists would have it) and the ever-popular 666. It bills itself as a tale of “murder, insanity, and terror in the music business” which basically makes it sound like a fictionalized extrapolation of every scare-tactic talk show from the late 80s that set out to convince the good, upstanding people of middle America that Twisted Sister existed to reap their childrens' immortal souls.

So I was gonna take one for the team, read this thing, describe it. But I just can't. It just looks so shitty. And I have a consistently growing pile of great books I need to get around to that I don't have enough time for. But I don't think it matters. You don't need to really read this book at all. All that's necessary are a few quotes to know the general gist of the thing. I genuinely feel that a fairly fleshed-out impression of the book's overall plot can be gleaned from a handful of these lines.

-"'Joo guys are the rock group, right?' the short, cute Brazilian prostitute asked."

-"'I'M A SLUT KILLER FOR SATAN!' Monty yelled, his voice cracking."

-"Porn queen, Satan's slut, get on your knees and fuck. Suck and moan and show your cunt and let the jiz run down your butt."

-"'What's 'Bloody Hell' mean?' Bobby Shapiro asked, smiling. 'Is that the English version of 'Oh Fuck' or something?'"

-"'Who's Norman Mailer?' one of the record company executives asked.

'Guy who wrote All In The Family, I think,' Bobby Shapiro said."

-"It was the type of hood an executioner would wear, except that it had white lines on it. It took Gil only a second to realize that the white lines on the hood Monty was wearing formed an upside-down cross."

-"He walked over to the homeless man and, with his back to the street, pulled out his gun. He had screwed a silencer on it. This was his chance to get another soul to serve him in Hell."

-"Della was looking into the barrel of the pistol, helplessly knowing that at any second a bullet would spew from the gun and rip her open like a cantaloupe."

-"Greg, could you please fuck me? I'm so excited from watching you pee I think I'm going to explode."

And so on. And from my willfully ignorant standpoint, I maintain that those quotes are enough, that not even reading the entirety of the text would answer the lingering questions. Is this book designed as some sort of weird Christian propaganda? Even skimming it turned up far too much anal sex and too many golden showers to make that likely. And if that's not the point, then who is the intended audience? It's far too ignorant of metal and Satanism to appeal to many fans of either, and far too lurid for the more moralistic of readers. Were the clumsy metaphors just the product of a bad writer, or does the author actually rip open cantaloupes? Who is the author? His or her website features only a cover image of this book with no further information. It's a thoroughly confounding work, one I'm glad I purchased and perused but happier still that I didn't spend more than about twenty minutes skimming and summing up.

                              
                      (What I imagine the author thinks metal sounds like)


Also, if anybody wishes to read this modern masterpiece, I'll mail it to you for the cost of postage (and considering that there's one on Amazon for $131.65 right now, this may be the deal of a lifetime.)

...

Reconsider T

May 2003 – Middle of a month-long tour. Sitting in a venue in Little Rock, Arkansas. Supposedly a record store, but there's only a few dozen actual albums. Stage in the back. Two dudes selling PBR from a cooler behind the counter. Waiting for the fans that won't show up. To pass the time these guys are playing late 80s/early 90s speed metal promo video after late 80s/early 90s speed metal promo video on a VHS player that's seen better days. Most are forgettable, the sort of thing whose absurdity was laid bare in almost-equally un-memorable vehicles like The Decline Of Western Civilization 2. A succession of cowboy-booted hair farmers talking about how original their sound is and how inevitable their success will be. People that I never heard of before or since. But in the middle of it, Ice T. Ice T and Body Count. Little of that is even memorable, though there was a line, something to the effect of “see, a song like 'KKK Bitch' is deep 'cuz it's about racism and shit.” I ponder the absurdity of it all. Of Ice T, speaking through the years and the grainy video tape. Of the degree of masochism necessary to subject one's self to the degradations and shattered dreams that are almost inherent to a creative life. Played the show to nobody except the two employees. One of the best sets we ever did.

March 2012 – Woke up on my 29^th birthday, “Cop Killer” inexplicably in my head. Haven't heard the song in years. Pondered a connection, couldn't put it together. Considered the mysterious currents that waft around our various cortexes, delivering seemingly arbitrary snippets of a life's worth of detritus to the forefront of our consciousness, only to have it recede again into the synaptic stew from which it bubbled. Made coffee. Downloaded the first Body Count album. Pretty much as ridiculous as I remember it being, though I still rather enjoy it. The musicianship is fairly bumbling and the lyrics are clumsy, but it's not without its charm. It all sounds like the point where New York crossover thrash was slowing down a bit, but hadn't quite devolved into groove metal and rap-rock. Except performed by people who were not at all well-versed in the ways of their instruments.

Some of it's just not awesome. “Voodoo” kinda just sounds like the worst of Danzig's lyrical conceits, taken to a weird, dramatic extent. Ice T's attempt to sing on “The Winner Loses” is also pretty goddamn atrocious. It's almost good, it's so bad. Almost. But there were other moments that, while as subtle as a fart at a funeral, were actually pretty on point. The lingering race question weighs heavily on the album. It reflects in “Cop Killer,” “KKK Bitch,” “There Goes The Neighborhood,” etc. And while it's never addressed in an especially nuanced fashion, it is interesting to hear the variety of ways in which it's brought up. It's really easy to hear the over-the-top vulgarity of the album but there's something to a lot of these songs, a bluntness that's a little more in touch with reality than a lot of metal tends to be.

Cop kill... er....

But it's honest. They weren't saying what a million hardcore bands hadn't already said, but they brought this sort of thing to larger crowds than ever before (if you don't count “I Shot The Sheriff” or whatever). They made cop-killing catchy. They tried to show things as they were, to pull back the mask. They may have outlived their moment in the sun, some of them at least (R.I.P. Beatmaster V, Mooseman, and D-Roc the Executioner). And their legacy won't ever shake Law & Order. But for a minute there, they made something threatening. Something that was, as the man said, deep. Because it was about racism and shit.

--

Body fucking Count

--

Post Script - so I just did a search and realized our man Cobras already posted this one, beating me to the punch by three years or so. But I already typed the motherfucker out, so yeah.

Herpes – Medellín (1989)

My first ever post for Illcon detailed the recorded output of Parabellum, without hyperbole, one of the most leftfield, fucked sounding death metal bands ever to exist. In that particular piece I was tempted to mention guitarist Carlos Perez's side project, with the the not-easily-Googleable-in-public moniker Herpes, but I decided against it. I don't want to tempt fate, and I fear that crossing two streams of such unrelenting force and brutality, parralel though they may have run, might cause some sort of rip in the fabric of the universe, some irreversable disruption that I don't want my fingerprints on. But here we are, several months hence. I feel the coast is clear and I hope I'm not wrong.

Herpes was the brainchild of the aformentioned Perez, who I believe played all the instruments on this release (information is fairly scant). The genre tag closest in proximity to this album would probably be grindcore, but that's only part of the picture. Grind, in 1989, was one of the most fringe forms of music, with its practictioners pushing the boundaries of conventional tonality. But compared to Herpes, the Napalm Deaths and Bolt Throwers of the world seem reserved, almost conservative, in comparison. I can't even say with any certainty that there are riffs or structure present in any of these songs. Growled vocals and blasting drums are audible (the former more clearly than the latter), but these are buried in sheets of dissonance, cascading waves of caustic, searing noise. Presumably this is provided by guitar and bass but it's difficult to tell. The album sounds like a recording of some sort of industrial metalworking facility pushed past peak production to the verge of collapse.

It ultimately sounds closer to Merzbow or early power electronics practictioners than it does any metal band. The tonality, if the term can be accurately applied here, is so thoroughly destroyed that even making a comparison is a tricky endeavor. Herpes (now as an actual band, I think – there are live videos that show more than one member) did release an album in 2004 that displays a comparable lack of regard for conventional structure, but lacks Medellin's cavernous, brittle anti-production. This constrast is interesting, because it almost seems like the recording studio itself was as much an instrument in the construction of Herpes' sound as the actual guitars, drums, and vocals were. Because while the band's most recent material is interesting, it lacks some of the vicious rawness of the debut, a point that underscores Perez's ability to utilize what might seem to be a setback (a shitty recording studio) as an advantage, an aesthetic signature that nobody in his time was able to really come close to. Plenty of bands consciously tried to come up with material this noisy and came off contrived, this shit is the real deal. It's brutal because it has to be, there were no other options available. Thoroughly noisy, thoroughly fucked sounding, but also an inimitable transmission from music's fringes.

--

Herpes – Medellín (1989)

Suppression/Grief - Split EP (1995)

Growing up in a relatively small, somewhat culturally isolated city tucked away in the recesses of the Blue Ridge Mountains, punk rock came as a fucking godsend. I'll spare the whole getting-into-the-music story that's been done to death, but suffice to say it made an impression. However, while it tapped into a lot of feelings I had previously no understanding of how to articulate, most of what I could find out about the music in those days before the internet was the ubiquitous force it is today seemed to indicate that it had ended around the time Sid Vicious died, or in the case of hardcore, around the time the Bad Brains broke up the first time around and all the New York bands went metal. Coverage was scanty, so I took what I could get. I discovered Heartattack and more contemporary bands – His Hero Is Gone, Gehenna, Rorschach, etc. - not long afterwards, but it still seemed like something that happened a million miles away.

But I would search out what I could, often spending my limited early teenage income on whatever records looked cool. Not a great formula for finding killer music, but in one notable case it provided more than a little blowing of the ol' mind. It was such a small thing, something that would've been so easy to overlook, a split 7” with a flimsy green cover with some photos of dudes playing and destroying instruments on one side and some shit on the other that looked like it could've come from some high school stoner's art project. And it was a dollar. So I took my chances.

And one side was good. A band from Massachusetts called Grief. I'd heard some slower heavy music before – Melvins, Sabbath, etc. - but Grief took it all and injected some serious psychotic depressing vibes to it. I enjoyed it (if “enjoy” is the right word for something so nihilistic), gave it a few listens and flipped it over. The other band, Suppression, simply fucking destroyed. I'd heard some grindy shit before, had my mind similarly blown by Napalm Death not much earlier, but Suppression was next level. It was a feral blur, sheets of sound draped over blastbeats with harsh noise textures clawing their way through.

I didn't really know much about this sort of thing. I had no real exposure to noise beyond my dad's Sun Ra albums. I had no idea that there was this genre of lurching start/stop noise called power violence and that Suppression was one of the most vicious yet interesting examples of the style. And until finding that record, I had no idea that they (or anybody with ideas so extreme) were operating in the same small, punk rock-deprived city that I lived in. And that was the other facet to how mind-blowing Suppression was. Their music was – and remains – fucking killer. But that such a band could pop up in the same boring, backwater town in which I felt so isolated was an amazing feeling. It brought the world closer to home and provided an example of how great things can be made out of mediocre surroundings.

I managed to get most of Suppression's releases over the years and the majority of it is spectacular. It's like if Man Is The Bastard kept the noise parts, but instead of wandering off into the more technical instrumental parts, they opted for the blunt ferocity of Crossed Out or No Comment. Even after power violence turned into a higher-profile subgenre in recent years, with hordes of shitty youth crew bands throwing in a few blast beats and thinking that turns them into the next Infest, Suppression's music remains as bracing and compelling as when it was released.

During the late '90s, the band moved more into noise/ power electronics material and for several years their only performances and releases saw the band indulging their most dissonant impulses. It was interesting to watch – I recall one show where the band attached amplified contact microphones to bibles and beat them to shreds with dildos – but not always easy to sit down and listen to. In more recent years, the band has operated as a bass-and-drums duo, working in a vein that's somewhere between Ruins and early Butthole Surfers – frantic, obnoxious (in a good way) noise rock (sample song title: "Well Hung Toddler") that surprisingly doesn't stand in too stark contrast when the band breaks out some of their old power violence material, as they've thankfully been doing recently.

Bassist/singer Jason Hodges (the only consistent member of Suppression) runs an excellent label called CNP Records, which put out a compilation of all the Suppression material from their early years that's definitely well worth picking up. But as a bit of a taste of the mayhem inside, the band's split with Grief, the sort of new lenses that helped my younger self view the world differently, can be acquired below.

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When caged like animals, we will act accordingly.

Blue Öyster Cult - s/t (1972)

And you may be wondering to yourself why you should give this a chance. A reader of this fine blog, obviously worldly and well-schooled by their choice of internet diversion, probably thinks they know the score. But seriously, forget whatever associations you may have picked up over the years. Forget “Godzilla”. Forget the accrued distaste classic rock can leave in a young punk or metalhead in the middle of nowhere, when such things are deemed normative and your Morbid Angel or Dead Kennedys t-shirt is seen as an indicator of the worst sin imaginable: that of difference. And for fuck's sake, forget Christopher Walken and cowbells. Forget all these things and the genius of the first Blue Öyster Cult record can make its grandeur known to you (well, really any BÖC from the '70s is pretty killer, but the first one is heads and tails beyond any of 'em).

Consider:

• The use of umlauts in a band name – How many rock bands did this before BÖC? I can count on a closed fist. How many did it after? Couldn't count on all the fingers in the world.

• The band's name itself – taken from a poem by manager Sandy Pearlman referencing a group of aliens who secretly control Earth's affairs.

• The band's logo – taken from an alchemical symbol denoting lead (the heaviest of metals).

• The (unsubstantiated but hopefully true) rumor that, during the early '90s the band's popularity had plunged to the point where their show guarantee was $200. I've seen bands play living rooms and get paid more than that. Meaning, that at one point in time, it was conceivable that Blue Öyster Cult could have played your living room. They didn't. And probably wouldn't. But it's closer to the realm of possibility than with many comparable bands.

Alchemy? Aliens guiding mankind's destiny? Umlauts? I'm actually surprised this record hasn't gotten any coverage on Illcon before. Theirs is a weird shadow world, a world of Satanic biker gangs (“Transmaniacon MC”), of drug deals gone fatally wrong (“Then Came The Last Days Of May” - apparently based on the murder of three of singer Buck Dharma's friends [and let's consider that name for a minute – how many rock and roll frontmen had a name that was a play on words regarding the transcendence of several religions' concept of universal harmony and balance? It's fucking brilliant in a way that such showbiz rechristenings pretty much never are]), of the power of music as destroyer (“Cities On Flame With Rock And Roll”) and redeemer (“Redeemed”). And then along the way a few detours into bondage-inclined Canadian Mounties, astrological/alchemical musings, and what seems to be a paean to violent foot fetishism.

This.

It can be difficult to understand how to take this weird cross-pollination of ideas. It could be that they were simply trying to move past the initial era when rock and roll had to mean something (maaaaan), before the conceptual side of the music that had started so innocently bloated up into prog rock's worst excesses. But I like to think that there was a more unified vision at work, a manifestation of the dark turn that the era of peace and love had taken by 1972. Perhaps not exactly a literal representation (though much of the drug-related material seems to have had some basis in the tangible world) but an extrapolated vision of star-crossed losers, the ones who had cast their lot with the aspiring world-changers and had come up radically short. It's an almost Pynchonian narrative, a nebulous cluster of ideas in which connecting lines are not drawn for the listener, one that might seem like a forced, inchoate melange of weird-for-weird's-sake iconography if it weren't for the fact that it's treated with some degree of gravity.

Not this. Never this.

While BÖC was intended to be the American Black Sabbath, rarely did their debut album indulge in that kind of heaviness (“Cities On Flame...” is about as close as it comes). Instead, the band showcases a musical versatility that their later albums lack. There are a few musical detours, some jaunty, syncopated lounge jazz rhythmic devices, some lead guitar work that almost sounds like it could've come from a Buck Owens song – but the real heaviness is a sort of slow and eerie atmosphere that sounds like the sonic equivalent of a lava lamp and a black light, Sabbathian only in the sense that it's not far removed from “Planet Caravan.”

So let the good name of Blue Öyster Cult be clearly understood. Scour the dollar bins for copies of this record (but don't pay more than five dollars, if you do you're almost as foolish as somebody who doesn't own the album at all). Let rock and roll raze our cities and let the messages of lust and derangement guide our puny lives as our alien overlords had so obviously intended.

--

Blue Öyster Cult -s/t

Jester Beast - Destroy After Use (1988)

Anybody who's ever tried to start a band knows that one of the most difficult parts is finding a name that's halfway decent and hasn't been taken. It's a daunting proposition, and there are definitely some really great bands who have been marred with shitty names (coughcoughWeekendNachoscoughcough). It really is a shame when a great band is marred with a name that elicits the “no, but really they're actually good” defenses and one of the prime offenders that I've found is Turin, Italy's Jester Beast.

I'm not entirely sure what a “jester beast” would be exactly. Some sort of clown-painted bear? A juggling shark? A dragon that makes balloon animals? It kinda sounds like something that would adorn a black light poster in Spencer Gifts, but that doesn't really clear much up. Nor does the name really fall under the band-naming approach of juxtaposing two or three cool-sounding words regardless of their meaning - “beast” is pretty overused in metal, and clowns, while they may be scary, aren't scary in a particularly metal sort of way. Just because something's creepy or unsettling doesn't mean it needs to be a metal band's name. I fear growing old and dying unloved in some nursing home that smells of urine while an ex-felon nurse is stealing my medication but I don't think Geriatric Abandonment would be a very good band name.

Appellations aside, If you catch Jester Beast at the right point in their existence, they were fucking killer. Their first appearance, a song on 1983's Heavy Metal Made In Italy, sounded like a slightly punk-ish Motley Crue and their first full-length, 1991's Poetical Freakscream (which sounds like a fucking Spin Doctors album title) was pretty standard Anthrax worship, polished and competently performed but lacking any qualities that separated them from the six billion other bands trying to sound like Anthrax in 1991. However, in the years between those two releases, the band put out the Destroy After Use demo which remains one of the best crossover releases that has ever been committed to tape.

This, of course, isn't saying much. Most crossover lacked hardcore's acerbic brevity and metal's dark intensity, treading water in a middle ground of flip-brimmed baseball caps and puffy hi-top Nikes. Jester Beast's demo, however, sounds like some alternate musical universe where DRI and COC got more vicious and frantic with the incorporation of metal rather than turning into shitty thrash-lite or cornball Southern rock (respectively). If all the crossover bands took a page out of the Hellhammer book instead of trying to be the next Metallica, there would be a shitload more bands that managed the frantic brutality of Jester Beast in their prime.

Italy had a strong scene for heavier music during this period, whether metal (Death SS, Dark Quarterer) or punk (Raw Power, Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers) and while Jester Beast may not have attained the notoriety garnered by many of their contemporaries - though apparently they did have members of hardcore bands like Declino and Negazione and had played shows with Morbid Angel and Cro-Mags amongst others – their demo holds up far better than pretty much any band from the era that attempted to bridge the divide between hardcore and metal.

Would a Jester Beast by any other name thrash as hard? Sometimes we must look past the obvious if we are to find something greater, more pure and terrifying. It may be easy to dismiss a band like this based on name alone (just like it may be easy to harp on them for their terrible-ass name), but their music claws from under the corpse-pile of forgotten metal bands, incapable of being forgotten by anybody who has devoted any effort or time to this means of expression.

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Jester Beast - Destroy After Use

Gehenna - Negotium Perambulans In Tenebris

In a previous post, Cobras kicked over a trio of albums by Gehenna – the Norwegian one, the one with keyboards – and gave a fleeting mention to the other Gehenna. Now I don't know how his taste in these things lies specifically, but the other Gehenna, the American one with no keyboards or corpse paint, was always my preferred variant. I'm not gonna do some blow-by-blow comparison of the two, that'd just be a rotten apples-to-rotten oranges situation (though apparently iTunes can't keep the two straight) , but I'll let my choice in Gehennas stand on its own merit.

When I was getting into hardcore and punk in the mid-90s, there was some really killer shit out there, but little of it could touch the bleak mean-spiritedness of Gehenna. Theirs was a fearsome rumble, lacking an exact point of reference. It was heavy as shit, generally fast, and dark as fuck. One can pick out hints of Hellhammer or other proto-death metal bands, but the delivery was far too stripped-down to align itself that strongly with metal. It often got lumped in with the “Holy Terror hardcore” sound – Integrity, Starkweather, et. al. - but was far rougher sounding, eschewing the tough guy vibe of the former and the artiness of the latter (though I do love both bands) in favor of a succession of short, blunt explosions. While the two bands didn't really sound alike, Gehenna sometimes reminds me of Rorschach, in the sense that both bands melded fairly disparate strands of metal and hardcore without falling into the dreaded metalcore trap. It was hostility embodied and it laid waste most other bands that tried to use negativity and edginess as some pose.

Theirs was an existence clouded in rumor and innuendo, with stories of their sketchiness abounding. Growing up in a small town in Virginia, I was pretty far from the thick of things, but tales about the band all being homeless, about them not owning instruments, about singer Mike Cheese stabbing somebody all came down the pipe at some point. One could also call to mind the story of a more recent reunion show where everybody but Mike Cheese quit a week before the show, and rather than tell anybody, he let the show go on and in lieu of a performance, he walked out onstage in front of a sizable crowd, sat down, smoked a joint, ate a burrito, then left. I couldn't attest to the veracity of any of this (though in the days of acquiring albums by sending well-concealed cash, Gehenna's was the first album I never received in return for my hard-earned lawn mowing money), but I can speak for the ferocity of the band's music.

I can't say whether Illcon readers will prefer this to the Euro Gehenna, so to at least bridge the gap a little bit, I included a link to their most metallically-titled release (also the only full-length that's out of print), 2000's Negotium Perambulans In Tenebris, a raging chunk of churning, blackened hardcore that lays waste pretty much any band attempting this particular style. I'm thankful that this band is still putting out albums, but I'm even more thankful that they've sacrificed none of the brutality that made them an unstoppable force in the first place.

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Gehenna - Negotium Perambulans In Tenebris

Hadez - Guerreros De La Muerte (1986)

I've found that I can pretty much get down with any metal band from Central or South America from the years 1980 to 1990. Lot of really batshit crazy material, the type of shit that only some combination of isolation and motivation can produce. I mentioned the Parabellum album in my first contribution to Illcon but they're hardly the whole picture. And while they may have been one of the more extreme examples (even the most extreme, depending on who you might ask), there were legions of other like-minded metalheads that pushed their music towards an extremity that's rarely been paralleled. A good example is Lima, Peru's Hadez.

And holy shit, the cojones on this fucking band. So the first song on the first demo they release is pretty much the riff from Pentagram's "Forever My Queen" note-for-note played at various speeds (a striking similarity the band may or may not have been aware of, as the Pentagram song, while initially recorded in 1973, didn't see a semi-official release until twenty years later).

That's their introduction to the world.

That.

Then the next song kicks off with a riff that's stolen fucking exactly from Hellhammer's "The Third Of The Storms". But in between what seems like stabs at blatant plagiarism, the band moves into a zone where they may be falling completely apart or they may be taking off onto some higher plane of musical reality. It's hard to tell which. They'll throw in a standard thrash riff, but then everybody just starts soloing. And I don't mean melodic solos either. It's like everybody (drums included) is trying to cop the whole atonal noisemaking thing Kerry King built a career upon.

It almost borders on free jazz sometimes, like an evil Caspar Brotzmann or something. I'd like to think they were trying to advance the art form with a sort of hyperspeed avant-garde plunderphonic approach, but in all likelihood they were just banging this shit out based on enthusiasm and adrenaline with little concern for trivial details like songs, musicianship, or recording quality. Apparently, Hadez is still around and has a good number of releases under their collective bullet belt, but honestly I don't want to hear them. Even though there was a release called Extreme Badness On The World, which rules, there's no way any of their subsequent albums could be as spot-on perfect as this.

Oh yeah, and this may be the only band that utilized a "Z" in an intentional misspelling and can get away with it.

That's saying a fucking lot.

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Hadez - Guerreros De La Muerte

G.I.S.M. - M.A.N. (Military Affairs Neurotic) (1987)

Punk has a long history of disparaging artists who forsake the aesthetic upon which they initially based their sound, to the extent that one of the most grievous sins a punk band can commit is to “go metal.” On one hand, this is a fairly ludicrous condemnation, as punk and metal have informed each other since the start, whether that was Lemmy playing in the Damned (or touring with Amebix), Anthrax covering Discharge, or any of the cross-genre mutations that have sprung up when less restricted musicians have seen fit to break down the oppressive and artificial boundaries established by the more tight-assed in their midst. On the other hand, while examples of punk bands who have turned towards more metallic tendencies are legion, examples of bands who have done it well are few. This was the sort of jumping ship that produced SSD's How We Rock, Discharge's Grave New World, and everything Corrosion of Conformity did after 1986 (amongst many others). This, however, isn't to say that no bands could make the transition, and it would take one of the most abrasive and extreme to do it well.

Tokyo's G.I.S.M were among the first punk bands to pop up in Japan, having started in 1980. Their music showed some metallic tendencies from the start, but the performances were chaotic and the recording quality of early releases leaned towards a low enough fidelity that most specific components of their sound were difficult to discern. Early releases like Detestation possessed a ramshackle energy that manages to be menacing in the way that many such bands aspire to and few achieve (aided in no small part by the violent propensities of singer Sakevi Yokohama. Then there's the broken English of songs like “Endless Blockades For The Pussyfooter” and “(Tere Their) Syphilitic Vaginas To Pieces” [sic] – titles that may not have made much sense on a conscious level, but on a visceral level are difficult to top.

The band's follow-up, 1987's M.A.N. (Military Affairs Neurotic) – the band loved their acronyms, with even their name variously representing Guerrilla Incendiary Sabotage Mutineers, God In The Schizophrenic Mind, Gnostic Idiosyncrasy Sonic Militant, and other monikers that may or may not make sense – was not as well-received. The songs were slower with more emphasis on melody, the production values somewhat cleaner, the approach more varied. Even die-hard G.I.S.M fans often have a hard time with M.A.N as it is often seen as work that lacks the abrasive gut punch of Detestation, but listening to the album clear of preconceptions reveals that these judgments are unduly harsh – while it may not have been the manic whirlwind of misanthropy and distortion that characterized its predecessor, it's actually a prescient metal album characterized by a marriage of guitar harmonies and shrieked vocals that would resonate throughout the metal world in the decades to come.

It's easy to try boiling M.A.N down to a formula – Iron Maiden guitars, vocals not far removed from the early Scandinavian black metal bands starting to make noise half a world away, and galloping drums all captured in the sort of tinny, reverb-heavy production preferred by discerning low-budget metal bands of the day. And that's a large chunk of what was going on with the album, but it's not quite the apt summation it might at first seem. What is most easily ignored is that M.A.N was imbued with a songwriting sense that many such bands fail to grasp. The songs weren't just a string of riffs, they were compositions that ebbed and flowed under their propulsive thrust. It's an attention to structure that's imbued in the album as a whole as well, not simply the individual songs. The record builds and releases tension, with the occasional eerie interlude that sounds not far removed from the creepier moments of Whitehouse or Throbbing Gristle. It was an embrace of structure and melody as a means of pushing an extreme agenda rather than as a step down the road to selling out and it was one that, while not always appreciated by their fans, was a testament to the band's creative power.

There's little question that their earliest work inspired legions of crustier hardcore bands but it's difficult to say what influence the band's later work had on metal bands that ended up playing music with similar characteristics. Whether G.I.S.M was aware of these bands is a matter of debate, but the fact that drummer Ironfist Tatsushima has played in traditional black metal band SSORC suggests that, at some point at least, there were some dots connected. Conversely, it's not hard to hear echoes of M.A.N in early Dissection or At The Gates, though such bands may or may not have been aware of G.I.S.M's work and definitely lacked their versatility, experimental tendencies, and sonic menace. Ultimately, G.I.S.M was always a cult band, one shrouded in mystery and notoriety, the type spoken of in reverent terms out of equal parts love and fear. Their influence might rear its head from time to time in unexpected places, but they constantly challenged both their detractors and supporters, making some killer records in the process.

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G.I.S.M. - M.A.N. (Military Affairs Neurotic)

H.P. Lovecraft - II (1968)

It's little surprise that the work of H.P. Lovecraft has resonated through metal as much as it has. Preoccupation with otherworldly evil, a whole-hearted willingness to offer point blank depictions of situations meant to dismay anyone with delicate sensibilities, and a concision that can be appreciated by even the most ADD-addled Napalm Death fan. It's a relationship that extends back to the genre's origins (“Behind The Wall Of Sleep” gracing Black Sabbath's first album), and one that has little parallel in any other style.

From what I can gather, however, the first band to lay bare their debt to Lovecraft's work was the California-by-way-of-Chicago band with the rather unsubtle moniker H.P. Lovecraft. The band started as a collaboration between folk session musician George Edwards and classically-trained multi-instrumentalist Dave Michaels, after the owners of Dunwich Records (that's right) suggested the name and morose aesthetic to the members. The band recorded their an eponymous debut album which, while featuring the langorous title track “The White Ship,” was a largely uninspired affair, a melange of fairly standard garage rock and pop psychedelia that was being heavily peddled at the time.

The band relocated to the more hippie-friendly climes of San Francisco in late 1967, and were generally well-received, selling thousands of albums in the Bay Area alone and touring the West Coast heavily. Due to the extensive touring schedule, the band had little time to prepare material for their sophomore release and when it came time to record H.P. Lovecraft II, the band had to rely on studio improvisation, orchestration, and extensive use of trippy sound effects. The resulting album was received far less warmly despite the fact that it demonstrates a band utilizing a variety of strengths to create something that stood apart from the sunnier side of most rock music being produced at the time.

Shame this guy doesn't show up.

Tightly-intertwined vocal harmonies display the two singers' varied backgrounds, songs drop away into eerie sound effects or string sections, brief bits of narration provide a sinister edge. The fact that all the Strawberry Alarm Clock fans of the world didn't get it is a testament to its power. It was an exploration of the soul's darker corners, still psychedelic, but in a way that only occasionally references the flowers and sunshine tropes of the band's contemporaries. Yeah, they sing about love sometimes, and there aren't too many literal references to Lovecraft's literary works, with notable exceptions like “At The Mountains Of Madness,” but the general mood is one of a band reaching for something more unsettling than their contemporaries and succeeding wildly, providing an effective evocation of Lovecraft's writing and a portent of the manner in which his writing would affect similar somber-minded bands for decades to come.

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H.P. Lovecraft - II

Harry Partch - The World Of Harry Partch (1969)

Anybody who's been a party to any sort of music writing at all knows that well-worn descriptors like “unique” and “original” are by and large a fucking joke. Ninety-nine percent of everything that's ever had that title slapped upon it fell so short of deserving the honor that terms like that are cheap, tawdry husks of the higher creative impulses they supposedly describe. This isn't to say that unique forms of creative expression are impossible, but they require a retreat into either the feral or the cerebral that most people are unwilling to attempt (though the nagging optimist in me would suggest that anybody is capable, given the proper motivation). The former has birthed well-loved aesthetic concepts as disparate as grindcore or (the lamentably-titled) outsider art, and it often seems that artists who fly by the seat of their pants in the direction opposite that of convention are often afforded more appreciation than those who take a more studious route. And while the more carefree approach might be more immediately gripping and viscerally satisfying, there is something to be said for those whose intellectual pursuits place their creative output in a league beyond anybody else's.

A prime example of this is Harry Partch. Partch studied composition from a very early age, amassing a substantial body of work for an artist as young as he was. He grew impatient with the limitations of the equal-tempered scale, the basis for the vast majority of Western music, and began to look towards microtonality, a process of dividing the octave scale into smaller components – his most famous take on this being the forty three-note scale (the equal-tempered scale is divided into twelve notes), though he employed a substantial number of variations on this. These ideas were all expounded upon in his 1949 book Genesis Of A Music, a product of twenty-six years of writing, that railed against the numbing conventions that centuries of inculcation in the equal-tempered scales had produced, instead favoring the ratio-based tuning scales of Greek philosophers like Pythagoras.

The problem, however, is that the majority of musical instruments from the Western world were designed for the twelve notes of which its music is most commonly comprised. Partch's necessity then spurred his inventiveness and an arsenal of odd instruments was born, pieces with monikers like the Cloud Chamber Bowl, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl that occasionally drew inspiration from violins, pianos, and marimbas, but often bore no resemblance to anything that had come before. He was, as he humbly put it, “a philosophic music man seduced into carpentry,” the builder of strange creations, as much sculpture as functional musical instrument. The music for which these had been produced was equally staggering, both in the breadth of the influences from which it drew and for just the sheer peculiarity.

Partch pulled from a variety of sources over the course of a life filled with extremes. His lifelong engagement with Pythagorean tuning was possibly the most readily apparent of his sources, but the hobo graffiti that he witnessed riding the rails during the Depression held as much sway over his later work. Prior to his destitution he had consulted with William Butler Yeats regarding an experimental opera treatment of Yeats' translation of Sophocles. His homosexuality, in an era in which it was largely considered aberrant (at best), was occasionally touched upon. The influence of music from Polynesia, India, and Africa occurred decades before the West began to look seriously towards those cultures' music.

What he did with those influences is the notable part, because few are easy to spot. Partch had his precedents, but his take on those elements had no direct predecessor. It's an eerie, sensual music, one that reaches across large swaths of the temporal and the geographical, plucking disparate strains of the arcane and blending them into a seamless whole, a junkyard opera on the edge of perception, a subversion of rarely-considered social fundamentals, a leap forward into a distant past. Disorienting and disarming, it is among the only bodies of work that deserves the tag “unique.”

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Harry Partch - The World Of Harry Partch