Kyuss - Gardenia

LISTEN TO THE WHOLE THING.

When you first drop the needle on a copy of Kyuss (Affectionately referred to as Welcome to Sky Valley by most fans), you might think that there is a problem with your stereo, because there is just no possible way the music emanating from the speakers should sound this distorted. But you would be wrong, as the Palm Desert quartet plays with the fuzz turned up to eleven and enough volume to reduce a mountain to a swirling storm of dust.

This is music that feels constantly in motion, as though by listening to it you are placed at the wheel of a 1968 Pontiac GTO and are launched down a desolate highway getting really shitty gas mileage the whole way. The riffs smolder in the speakers as your ears take a drag and thick smoke pours out of your mouth as though you just took a hit off a bong the size of an oil drum.

As the sun sets over the mesa and the stars come out, flashing lights and sirens fill the night air as you glance down at the speedometer and realize that you are flying down the road at 666 miles per hour. Then as though channeling the Duke brothers or Mad Max, you floor the gas pedal, take another hit from the cinder tipped speakers, flip your headlights off and let go of the wheel.

Hyperbole aside, this is serious driving music, highly recommended for any road trip or long commute in warm weather where you can crank it with the windows down and feel the breeze.

Listen to "Wretch" on YouTube
Listen to "Blues For The Red Sun" on YouTube
Listen to "Welcome To Sky Valley" on YouTube
Listen to "And The Circus Leaves Town" on YouTube

Diabolic - Celestial Pleasures

Riff mark: 1:00 mark

Not bad American death metal just a wee smidgeon late to the regional Tampa prime, although Diabolic’s (anti)spiritual home truly lies in the northeastern pikes with Incantation and Immolation. Vengeance Ascending is a brisk jog to the finish line behind pioneering bands who established the USDM take-no-prisoners slaughter mere years before, yet defiantly remains a solid, individualized record, albeit the center of the venn diagram comparing/contrasting the In and Im, not a complex piece of fascinating shapeshifting guitarwork, but not a bleeding noise of atonal grumbling, either (never heard an Incantation album I liked). So, really great Vigna-esque guitar solos from Jerry Mortellaro and fast-forward double bass kick from (oh god that’s really his nickname) Aantar “Blastmaster” Coates, but ease up on those triggers, man. Violent and refreshingly gimmickless.

Stormtroopers of Death - Kill Yourself

1:13 mark.

As I sit here with the sound of Scott Ian's most recent dad rock offering, Motor Sister, reverberating through my ear canal, I am left with that all too familiar feeling that one gets when one of your favorite musicians puts out something truly embarrassing. Granted it could be worse, everyone seems to have forgotten the existence of The Damned Things which featured Mr. Ian and 2 members each from Fall Out Boy and Everytime I Die and sounded like Maylene and The Sons of Disaster.

Rather than subject myself to this drivel, I am reminded of a time when a Scott Ian side project actually broke new ground in metal and hardcore. Recorded on spare studio time during Anthrax' Spreading The Disease sessions, Speak English or Die is a tour de force of crossover thrash genius that happened at just the right time. Released 5 months after D.R.I.'s Dealing With It and 2 months before Corrosion of Conformity's Animosity, the record became a corner stone of the crossover thrash sub-genre that blended the speed of thrash metal with the politically charged lyrics and churning mosh parts of hardcore.

The band also pioneered the less than 10 second song, several years before "You Suffer" was written, their debut record featured 4 tracks shorter than 8 seconds, one of which clocks in at 2 seconds. These tracks are referred to on wikipedia with the ridiculous revisionist history genre name of "blipcore", a term I promise was never used by anyone prior to the widespread usage of the internet by music nerds.

Speak English or Die has sold over a million copies worldwide which not only makes it pretty much the most successful release of its genre, it is also equally impressive considering the offensive lyrics the band employed to piss people off. Misogyny, xenophobia and general toilet humor are the bread and butter on this release, although the band goes to great lengths to assure the public that they are purely satirical.

It's my general opinion that the invention of crossover was the best thing that could have happened to thrash metal in the 80's as it helped stave off stagnation for a few more years and it also helped hardcore by helping to force the 1980-1985 sound which had run its course to move to the side and make way for the youth crew movement of the mid to late 80's.

S.O.D. did not play a lot of shows, as Scott Ian and Charlie Benante were comitted to Anthrax and Dan Lilker to Nuclear Assault. Singer Billy Milano started M.O.D. and carried on in a similar style. Sporadic reunions and releases would continue until 2003 when Milano and Ian's relationship soured and the two decided not to work together anymore. 

Fear Factory - Self Bias Resistor

Riff mark: 2:25

The industrial, elongated primal scream (or the spiritual score for Terminator 2: Judgment Day, your pick), Demanufacture rises Fear-lessly amongst piles of charred bones and greased bolts as the timeless-yet-futuristic bombardment of concepts driven to twelve. The smoothest, sleekest piston to operate from the Roadrunner catalog, Fear Factory scavenges the remnants of Godflesh’s grittiest grinders (no coincidence that Dog Day Sunrise is a Justin Broadrick-written cover), un-mangles the battered synthetics and injects tempo and treble, thus becoming the easiest of the loudest to ingest, additional kudos to the cybernetic mix and production of Front Line Assembly-liner Rhys Fulber. Dino Cazares’ right hand and Raymond Herrera’s double-bass kick (triggers thematically acceptable here) are the unworn engines of rhythmic battery, a uniform match made in a staccato, post-apocalyptic hell, never missing a millisecond of a beat. No solos, no showing off, no time for any part of the New Machine to function out of order. Pisschrist, even Burton C. Bell’s clean vocals lack vibrato, no cents sharp, no cents flat, right in tune, precise and without human error. Every song a declarative (barring the sludgy, ambient, morose A Therapy For Pain, a 10-minute closer/downer), a call-to-arms to a futile war against riffs that grow larger as they magnetize aggression. These are long beasts, averaging five minutes of cell life with all bars remaining. A real shock to alertness. Turn off all natural senses and burn away every micro-organism that makes up your flesh and plug in to the New Breed. Footnotes: In college I used Self Bias Resistor as my wake-up alarm for roughly two years. Throwaway tracks on limited edition digipaks. Still trying to find a way to synch album with film Tetsuo: Iron Man.

Helmet - Give It

0:14 mark.

If there was ever a record packed front to back with beefcake riffs, it is the lumbering behemoth that is Meantime. Former Band of Susans guitarist Page Hamilton formed Helmet in 1989 and after several 7" singles and debut LP, Strap It On released through Amphetamine Reptile Records, they unleashed this crusher as their Interscope Records debut in 1992.

Fortunately, I am the one doing this write up instead of my counterpart, otherwise you would be reading a review of Just Another Victim feat. House of Pain from the oh so wonderful Judgement Night soundtrack. Anyway, I digress, these riffs hit like a sledgehammer, either used for the demolition of a building or to cave in your skull. It might be hard to believe based on the fuzz laced noise coming through the speakers, but Page Hamilton has a masters degree in jazz guitar and has composed scores for a number of movies such as Heat and Titus.

Back to the matter at hand, which is the ringing left in your ears by the sonic force of this record. It is the audio equivalent of that gum commercial from a few years ago with the guy laying on the ball bearings with speakers vibrating them. Except in this instance the ball bearings have been replaced by live grenades. Not quite as relaxing as the commercial, but an accurate representation of the aural repercussions. Play this through some good headphones and put a cochlear implant on layaway.  

Listen to "Strap It On" on YouTube

Listen to "Meantime" on YouTube

Listen to "Betty" on YouTube

In Spirit of 3/11 Day

AxCx - Morbid Florist...all of it

 Riff mark - oh man

Boy. Positives first: it’s very likely the loudest album of 1992. It has slightly better recording values than Scum. Also, it’s not John Zorn. Negatives: eighteen minutes of sixty-minute noise. Blast beats over distorted guitars, played with sugar-and-Steel-Reserve attention spans mirroring those of vocalist Seth Putnam, a post-GG inverted artist who thrives on inside jokes and bigotry. I don’t know what he’s getting at, he just squeals indiscernibly all the fucking time on Morbid Florist, in what could debatably be the greatest (I use this adjective loosely) vocal performance in this subcategory of metal, or something like metal and hardcore and grindcore (whatever, they’re signed to Earache). These are troubled kids not giving a flip. Monotony + general disdain for fan base = these gems for song titles: Some Songs, Even More Songs, Some More Songs, Song #5, Song #6, Slow Song from Split 7”. I think one of those stretches five minutes and the rest are less than one. Fine, it’s a blur that starts and stops, then the track number on my CD changer bumps a digit. Laughed at the EMF and Eddy Grant covers, if you can call them that. God, I’ve written too much about this stuff and now unify with a niche that spends more time analyzing the band than the band does tapping creative veins. AxCx is an irregular triad of grindcore, performance art, and comedy. Music by a thread; as long as it holds sticks, strings, and microphones, it requires expectations.