Originally Posted Friday, June 25, 2010
Pain Teens - Born In Blood {1990}
Studio Recordings @128
Studio Recordings @128
Out of Print
...dark and creepy.
Track List:
01. The Basement (3:29)
02. Pleasures Of The Flesh (4:09)
03. Shotguns (2:45)
04. Bad In My Head (2:58)
05. The Way Love Used To Be (2:22)
06. Secret Is Sickness (2:43)
07. Lady Of Flame (3:24)
08. Desu Evol Yaw (2:23)
09. She Shook Me (3:47)
10. Christo (1:16)
11. My Desire (3:12)
12. Noh Jam (4:30)
The song "The Basement" is based on the Sylvia Likens murder.
The 2007 movie "An American Crime" was also based on that same tragic story.
The song "The Basement" is based on the Sylvia Likens murder.
The 2007 movie "An American Crime" was also based on that same tragic story.
One of the first bands to till the not-inconsiderable territory where industrial and goth intermingle, Houston's Pain Teens forged a signifier-heavy composite that harvested every cliché in both books but still managed to engross more often than it repelled. Maybe that has something to do with the sirenic presence of frontwoman Bliss Blood, who isn't shy about exploiting her physical charms — it's not hyperbolic to see her breathy, come-hither incantations as a sort of malicious, industrial-strength analogue to Traci Lords.
The gothic attributes are less obtrusive on the band's early records. Case Histories, compiled from prior cassette releases (and appended to the CD edition of its successor), follows chaos theory to the letter. Although most of the songs lob spitballs at the twin titans of church and state, Blood hits a pair of bull's-eyes: "Preppy Killer," which extrapolates from an infamous NYC murder case, and "New Woman," a solemn meditation on sexual mores. The overwrought Born in Blood's virtually centerless collages of creep-sound coalesce briefly when Scott Ayers' ambulance-siren guitar rises above the miasma of loops and samples, but the album doesn't take long to reveal itself as nothing but an extended hissy fit. At the end, we know that Blood probably doesn't care too much for whiskers on kittens or warm furry mittens, but tracks like "The Secret Is Sickness" and "Christo" divulge little else.
~trouserpress
Pain Teens - "Coral Kiss" (1995)
post 2996...
Born In Blood
+
Bonus "Death Row Eyes/The Smell" 7"
Reported to be limited to 3285 copies with 4 different colored vinyl versions,
this was the May 1992 installment in the Sub Pop Singles Club.
Thanks to texaspunktreasurechest.blogspot.com for Death Row Eyes 7"
I'M LOOKING FOR:
PAIN TEENS - Stimulation Festival ...let us know if you have this!
``Stimulation Festival`` is a fair approximation of what hell would sound like with the lid off. The Houston combo`s second full-length release on B-Hole Surfer King Coffee`s label is a 14-track dread- and chaos-permeated industrial slugfest, built around singer Bliss Blood`s drained, spoken-word ramblings and Scott Ayers` guitar hash and mechanistic studio manipulations. The lower-brain primitivism of ``Stimulation Festival`` has a trance-inducing repetitiveness, but it isn`t easy listening, and it certainly wasn`t designed to entertain. You approach this music on its terms, not your`s. Much of the album is almost inpenetrable, but somewhere around track 11, the Pain Teens suddenly hit a stride. ``Apartment 213,`` the last offering on the album, demonstrates what it`s like to be roommates with the Beast himself. It`s unnerving but involving.
By David Rothschild ~ Chicago Tribune
