It’s prolly this little bugaboo that’s giving me a little trouble with the new Cephalic Carnage. The band has the overwhelming talent to be five or six completely distinct ( and distinctly complete) different bands, and there’s the rub. Just when I start grooving on something, they completely switch styles (And I totally realize that I’m being a hypocrite; lots of my older favorite bands like Zep and the Stones played any ol’ style that caught their whim. But “consistency is the hobgoblin,” dig?) .

By no means let my crippling pissiness imply that this is a bad album; there’s tons of CC’s patented mystifying techgrind. There’s also one of the best non-black metal black metal songs of the year, and some proggy deathdoom that should make Opeth drink piss out of a boot.

It’s just a lot to eat at one sitting.

I’ve always wondered how some (very few) bands can actually recreate and express emotion in their songs while others (most) simply raise a racket. I suppose it doesn’t really matter as long as we benefit. Or enjoy. Or get torn a shiny new one. The thrash-grind absofuckinglute bear traps that Pig Destroyer are wielding in ’07 will send you on a real-time mainline into their hate, regret, and nauseating dread. Think of the best bands ever – the ones that really matter – and you’re there. This band has always been awesome, but Phantom Limb is beyond awesome, it’s actually important. It hurts.

So, how do they do it? Dunno and don’t care.

What matters is that this is real. This is the hard core. This is your album of the year, fuckers.

Choke on it.

Yesterday I had a day off during mortuary college finals and it was raining like a pure bitch, so I spent the AM sipping gin & lemonade, blasting my old Weakling and Antiseen cassettes, and watching Webe Web videos. (By the by, to Allison, Sherri, Marie and all my girls: I miss the shit out of y’all and hope you’re doing well. Hit me up with news about the case, K? K.) Regrettably, I decided that a very brief spate of industriousness would make my sloth even more delicious, so I brushed the beagles (NOT a euphemism) and threw on some CDs from the review pile.

And that’s when it happened …

I had created such a comfortable, human headspace that the Lordi album literally hurt my feelings and kind of made me wanna cry. It’s that insupportable.

The hype surrounding this group of treacherous and nasty Finns completely mystifies me. (And by the by, I need to know a racial slur for Scandinavians. I don’t guess I’ve ever heard one, and “herring-eating cocksucker” seems awfully unwieldy.) Lordi are basically GWAR impersonators who play the shittiest “rock” songs that Turbonegro never had the stupidity to mis-write. And they have the balls to fucking say they’ve never heard of GWAR. If you read any music magazines, you’ve seen their pictures. So, like, you be the judge, K? K.
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“The Man can’t bust our Music,” brothers and sisters. Trust me, don’t let Lordi hurt your feelings and make you wanna cry.

I was never that crazy about Antaeus’ earlier stuff, and their lyrics and presentation are a bit “Ricky Kasso” if ya get me, but Blood Libels is a bigger, badder, bitchier bitch. It’s not even really black metal as I usually conceive it: it’s more like death metal covering black metal. The muscularity and low, low lowness of DM (or good music, in general) are there to ballast all the swarming, snaking fever and trebly gnashing. Think Krieg reinterpreted by Angelcorpse and yr way close. Ricky Kasso would be all up over this shit. As am I.

En conclusion, droolz de la France, mais roolz d’Antaeus (et métal noir français en général).

Basically, most musicians are ugly and stupid.

Heard/felt as pure sound, Hibernaculum is a glorious fucking dream, huge clouds of candy and brine and soft, fat lips, continuing Dylan Carlson’s Americana experiments, but more realized and assured and more fucking MORE. But the accompanying DVD kills buzzes savagely. In various interview segments, Dylan reveals himself to be the most amazingly objectionable combo of burnout and art-fag. Dude, you play slow because you’re HIGH, not because you’re Phillip fucking Glass. It’s disgusting enough to make me turn sXe. But, God, I’d miss the cocaine, so … nope.

But it’s here.

Asunder ain’t exactly reinventing the steel, here, but God Hell, is this some good stuff. Taking the old-school funeral approach of Thergothon and Skepticism and injecting just enough melody to make it stick – without becoming the gothic mope-crawl of Shape of Despair or Saturnus (who I likewise dig, so save your breath) is. … a really long sentence. It’s also dead goddamn on.

I was a little thrown at first by the warmth of the engineering/mix; most funeral doom acts have a calculated, cold sterility that is part of the charm. But the more I listened, the more it made sense. This is pure analog, therefore, purely human. This is not some robot boo-hoo-ishness, these are some real dudes in a real room, going full-on suicidal, like Jim Jones guest speaking at Spahn Ranch around a mammoth evidentiary bonfire. And at 72 minutes (only two songs) you’ll have plenty of time to let it sink in. And it will sink in.

Doom album of ’06. Book it.

Well, ol’ Dunc’s motto seems to be, “You can’t go home again, and who the hell wants to?” Antimatter is pretty much straight up gorgeous, with pure girly vocals floating on ambient fake-dub and (mostly) acoustic guitars. Nothing particularly world-changing, but the strength of the songwriting (and my sweet tooth for girly vocals) makes Saviour a keeper. The songs work best when Duncan joins guest Michelle Richfield at the mike; his counterpoint tenor keeps things from getting too fey. But the most interesting track is “God Is Coming,” on which the Antimatter-ers use all those sequencers for evil, kicking out the jams in a Gathering-meets-Lords Of Acid beatdown.

Anathema die-hards are going to shit a cow, but in a scene absolutely glutted with warmed-over ideas (The Dreadful Hours, anyone?) Patterson and friends are at least to be credited with trying something new. Just keep those harder beats (and those girly vocals) coming.

 Great grind-noise-whatever bands manage to impress a sense of personality, whether it’s fun-lovin (Exit-13), goofy (Ghoul), or legitimately deranged (Pig Destroyer.) And AN does it too, with a worldview that contains greasy helpings of all three above-mentioned categories.

Of course there are the odd slow-downs and break-ups, noise tracks, and samples; but that’s forest-for-the-trees shit. What you really want to grok is the package as a whole. Like all great grind albums, Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope is best experienced all at once, so that the total effect can swim on in. And the total effect here is a fucking waster, like being dosed with acid then locked in a Gravitron with your ex-girlfriend. The music is wildly disorienting and almost totally random; it’s hard to believe the rhythm tracks are programmed. It just keeps diving and lurching at you in nuggets of drugged, oily misanthropy. In venom alone, this is like the stoned (therefore human, but no less evil) counterpart to December Wolves’ brilliant Blasterpiece Theatre, but AN seems to actually have an agenda that goes beyond annihilation.

When they talk about dosing water towers and shooting busloads of rich kids, sure, it’s a hoot, but it seems to cut a little deeper, they seem to be giving Charlie Manson an army of bionic she-devils instead of an army of runaway tards. The lyrics and the artwork all project a subtle, self-aware surrealism. The band this most reminds me of is Eyehategod (only in a really big hurry) and it don’t get sweeter’n that. I guess “vibe” is a goddamned ridiculous criteria to use in a review, but it really is the nutmaker here.

 I can’t explain why AN have recorded such a slaughterhouse, and I can’t explain why most other bands suck shit. (Unless they’re French, in which case I believe I can.) But this album instantly has Agoraphobic Nosebleed keeping company with Pig Destroyer and Circle Of Dead Children. This album doesn’t sound like an appliance, it sounds like a fucking gas chamber. Wonder what Chairman Charlie would say?

Very few of these bands transcend the iron-clad affectations of the genre to deliver anything other than coverband, fan-boy embarassment and horseshit. Atomic Bitchwax sometimes delivers, sometimes not. For those that don’t know, the Bitchwax is the platform from which Monster Magnet guitarist (and, therefore, Legitimate Rock Star) Ed Mundell gets to lowball his career by delvering late-night snakedance music for hesher drug orgies. This is probably a variant of the same impulse that keeps Bill (but not Hillary) Clinton coming back to Arkansas: the ever-popular ( and almost always wrong-headed) notion of “keepin’ it real.”

This album is a collection of old and new unreleased stuff, and it just goes to show that keepin’ it real can sometimes make you golden, and it can sometimes make you a jackass. The unfortunate standout track is a cover of AC/DC’s “Dirty Deeds,” which is literally note-for-note, but with the addition of some whirlybuzz sci-fi noise and the most puke-awful “singing” I’ve heard since I got out of the shower. I’m sure this was a stone blast in the studio, and would probably even make the nut live, but it should never have been recorded, and certainly shouldn’t have been released, and Goddamned sure shouldn’t have been the leadoff song. Track listing is everything, brothers.

After a Campari and soda (and a few spins of the original “Dirty Deeds”) to cleanse the spirit, I forged on, and things began to pick up like a motherfucker. The seven songs alternate between all-instro and vocal numbers, and each have their respective charms. “Get Your Gear” is an understated, suave lady-maker that would totally go over on AOR radio if the Bitchwax were old and in the way. “Black Trans-Am” has the goofiest vocal pattern this side of a pirate chant, and succeeds through volume and drugged pleasantness. The title track is one of those evil-acid noise jams that Monster Magnet used to be capable of in a mad way, but have apparently abandoned for Jesus. The obvious comparison here in terms of aesthetic and sound is Fu Manchu, but the Bitchwax is a way defter, more slippery creature, capable of peeling out Uriah Heep-style flourishes and purely retarded fuzzbomp with equal greasy aplomb. So call this a winner, just skip track one. Keep it real, y’all.

Instead, I’m on the floor of my apartment drinking Yoo-Hoo and trying to review this absolute piece of shit. The thing that so offends me here is the total lack of even trying. Abominant simply strung together thirty-six minutes’ worth of black/death cliches, tacked on some faux-evil mug shots (with beer!), and called it an album. The fucker is so faceless that it took me a couple of minutes to name-check the bands that they’re Xeroxing. When I began to hear chunks of Marduk and Dissection and Immortal, etc. none of whom are worth a bootfull of piss to me (but I digress), I managed to lose even more interest. And the liner notes actually give a “fuck-off to…posers…rap-core” etc. Seriously. Is that fucking METAL or what?

Why a band of presumably talented musicians from Kentucky would want to sound EXACTLY like a trillion or so talentless dicks from Scandia is way beyond me. But they made the call, so bend over, boys. The only greater mystery is why a label from Georgia (whoever the fuck “Deathgasm” is) would think that releasing this trash would serve any greater good. It IS all about the greater good, y’know – Power To The People! (Actually, Fuck The People, but again I digress.) I happen to have a pretty fair appreciation for black metal, but I can’t even like this as parody. And if someone out there DOES dig it, you should be ashamed of yourself. The cover of “Fight To Be Free” only reminds me what a cool band Nuclear Assault was. “Upon Dark Horizons” is loud, I’ll give it that. As an antidote to silence, it just might make the nut. Me, I kinda like the quiet, so fuck this. Listening to this album is as pointless and pathetic as waking up alone with your dick in your hand. Again.

Now on to the album at hand: what a fucking beast! Oblit Recs has assembled an absolute goddamn all-star team of the finest musical confrontationists on the planet, an album so heavy, so warped, so (just say it) grindy that it’s taken me a couple of weeks to even begin to digest it. Now, Nuclear Devestation is a band I’ve heard of, but never heard, so I was a little curious as to how they would fare against the two total giants who round off the thing. No worries. N.D. start the proceedings with a full-on deathgrind roar, occasionally tossing in some weird sounds and whatnot, but for the most part making like a basement Napalm Death, riff-roar-blast-squeal-end. A little more straight-forward than I normally like, but still groovy. They’re French, but I shan’t hold that against them. Very nice stuff.

CSSO are next, but I’ll save my applause till the end, thank you. Total Fucking Destruction is the third band here, and they are (along with Unholy Grave) my absolute favorite pure grind band. No death tendencies here at all, y’all, just pure crusty unraveling punk lunacy. If bands in the ’80s had known it was possible to play this fast, this could totally have been on SST Records, and I don’t know of a higher compliment. Snotty, rotted vocal squalling and weird tremolo guitar lines (think Cartoon Network black metal) and a drummer who almost always breaks his fucking BASS HEADS at gigs, it’s just perfect. Plus, “Fear Of A Black Metal Planet” is a great damn song title.

Now, CSSO. Clotted Symmetric Sexual Organ is quite possibly the most unhingedly brilliant band currently making rock-based music. I don’t know why the Japanese in general are so deliciously wacky (manga, “Iron Chef,” the Rape of Nanking), but god bless their little Nipponese hearts. CSSO seem to have little if any interest in rocking or being heavy, they just wanna blow minds. Spaghetti western whistling, theremin noodlings, psych guitar solos, a goddamn KAZOO, all squirming around in the band’s patented lo-fi torture boogie. Anytime things get even close to “normal,” CSSO finds a way to foal a little more fuckery, and the end result is as close to hallucinogenic as I’ve heard music get. Absolutely essential, as is the whole album. Three Way of Armageddon is an indispensible primer on truly underground extreme music. It crushes. It destroys. It roolz.

Virulence plays an almost absolute form of Dillinger-worship, and while that’s fairly dime-a-dozen now, they do it damn well. The incomprehensible riffs crash and jar quite effectively, the jazzy guitar spurts are cool as hell, and drummer Dan Meath is an all out monster. In fact, all-instro opener “Entrance” is one of the radder songs I’ve heard lately, full of space and whirly noise and ugly-pretty elan. Kind of Mingus via Pere Ubu.

But all good things die, and here come the vocal numbers. Danecek (sorry bro, but this is for the greater good) has the most generic, monotone hardcore holler that I’ve heard since the eighties, when you couldn’t swing your dick without hitting a generic hardcore hollerer. This worthless bark systemically sucks all momentum from the music, and just plain systemically sucks. There are a couple of instances of deep death growls that you’ll miss as soon as they’re over, but it’s mostly just that fucking barking. Literally any vox-style would suit this opaque, forward-thinking music better: black metal screeching, grind gurgles, actual singing, you name it. Shit, yodeling would have been more effective. Shame, because the band display some real talent and invention, but with this line-up, nope. So for Virulence: either get him lessons, or sack him and go instro. And for all you young hopefuls out there: conduct a few auditions before you let your brother’s roommate be the singer.

This is so, so bad. It’s unredeemable badness doesn’t necessarily reflect a lack of technique or even talent, but a total lack of originality and inspiration. “Nihility, etc.” (and please tell me what the fuck that even means) is like a collage of every dark/doom/black album you’ve ever heard, hitting all the most obvious signifiers while delivering zero in the way of freshness or passion.

Synthesized orchestral bullshit shackled to non-denominational hard rock plod just doesn’t sound all that evil or doomy anymore, gentlemen. And a quick tangential thing on “doom” lyrics: in the year 2002, any band whose lyrics are sprinkled with “thee” and “thou” is gonna get what they deserve. Blame MDB (whom I used to truly adore, honestly) for fostering the notion that these sort of faux-Shakesperean things are necessary to convey doominess. But blame Archaean Harmony (and please tell me what the fuck that means), and the countless others of their ilk, for still buying it.

Bands as disparate as the Melvins, Electric Wizard, and Khanate have proven that you can bring the doom without getting all medieval on that ass, so if you don’t say “thee” at the grocery, don’t fucking say it on your album. Enough. I’ve already wasted too much time on this.