Well, little ones, I'm off for a few days into the wild, but this live set by the mighty Jex Thoth ought to tide you over until Monday. There's already a backlash against this type of metal, primarily among the no-fun kvlt kops, but we're not about to allow them to break the spell for us, are we?
Howdy goddamn do! Hopefully all of my wonderful little Swamplings easily grasp one of the over-arching themes we deal with here in the Swamp: everything you've ever been told is a lie, unless there's a country song about it. Roger Miller was an ambitious young hillbilly who swiped a guitar from a traveling country singer and tried to figure out how to play it, correctly assuming that it was his only ticket out of his little doomed bullshit town.
When in doubt, post some Manilla Road! Here is the long-running metal underdogs' ferocious Poe-themed sixth album, Mystification. Straddling the thin line between traditional heavy metal and thrash, this record is just unbelievably thick, dense, packed with allegory, and darkly resonant. Another flawless gem from a criminally under-appreciated band.
Here's another album of unlikely collaborators - Nikki Sudden, front man of the wildly underrated post-punks Swell Maps, and Rowland S. Howard, guitar player of The Birthday Party. Come to think of it, can you call a band post punk when they started in the early 70's? Proto-post-punk, does that work?
I don't know a whole lot about these Spanish psych-thugs but I sure as hell know that this album is a flat-out scorcher. Hints of Blue Cheer power-trio blues, sweet harmonies that remind me of The Move, some tasteful piano boogie, and a few genuinely strange moments all come together into one tight, slightly ESL platter providing a soundtrack equally suitable for fucking, fighting, or spiritual exploration.
This overheated, bluesy album of duets from former New York Doll Johnny Thunders and the singer of the punk band Snatch (yeah, I've never heard of them either) seems to fit the hazy, bug speckled atmosphere in here right now. We have covers of Screaming Jay Hawkins, The Seeds, Elvis, The Shagri-Las, and many more. While this was produced right in the thickest, darkest part of the eighties, they're nary a gated snare, fake hand-clap, or cheesy synth on this album - instead we have gritty horns, lush strings, and ambiance for miles. Thunders is in fine voice, tackling these oldies like the anti-Buster Poindexter, and keeping up with the lovely Ms. Paladin seems to be propelling him every step of the way. One foot in the boroughs, one foot in the swamp.
Some great stuff on the turntable today, a compilation of sub-Saharan garage from the era where American fifties rock and sixties punk, along with British invasion sounds, began to filter out of the radios of white colonizers and out into greater Africa. There's little information on these bands, and the sounds vary greatly from songs almost indistinguishable from their northern hemisphere counterparts to crazy fusions of local rhythms and patois with off-kilter surf and psych. Twenty three songs, and not a dud among them. This is in the same league as the mighty Nuggets and Back From the Grave comps, but almost from another planet.
After an unexplained absence of three days I return to you with only this disgusting zombie metal record as commiseration. Really quite foul and perverted, this one, full of splattery sounds and lapses in taste. What a weekend...
Patience, little ones! I must exit the Swamp forthwith, but earlier today I found a copy of this seminal doom masterpiece on the cheap and I've just listened to it twice in a row. I know this blog thing is frequently full of rushed excuses and lazy half-explanation, especially lately, but your humble narrator has been unreliable from the beginning, so let's not get too upset, eh? This album ought to throw your own individual flaws into sharp relief, helpfully deflecting all criticism away from me.
I don't have much time tonight and, not coincidentally, little to say about this excellent album except that it may be the first true example of the "Gothenburg sound" made famous by At the Gates and In Flames. Dark Tranquility didn't quite reach the level of fame as those bands, but this classic clearly places them at the forefront of the genre they helped to create. The slightly goofy lyrics add a touch of humor and absurdity to a formula usually dominated by angst and self-seriousness, helping this album maintain distinction among Dark Tranquility's otherwise more stoic catalog. 
Perhaps it's a bit lazy to post two Japanese psych-freak bands in a row, but suppress your internet-bred automatic scorn response and just listen to this fucking thing. Contemporaries with luminary ronin like Guitar Wolf and Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, DMBQ are as gnarly and crazy as either of those bands without sounding anything like them. Heavier than a subway tube full of sarin gas, and wilder than a sake-drunk Godzilla staggering home and farting fire, this album is a hybrid of a more abstract MC5/BellRays joint and a lucid mid-period Boredoms record. Pound pound, scream, pound pound, scream, freak out, wah wah, scream scream, pound. Just like that, the album whirls like a massive wheel, threatening to hop the rail and crash directly into your forehead. Brace yourself.
Japanese guitar mutant Shinki Chen has appeared here before with his band Speed, Glue, and Shinki, but this is his first album, recorded under his own name while he was working on a Japanese production of the musical "Hair" (think about that for a second) with some help from his colleagues and associates. The opening number is a bit of a tease, an ambient drone number that could've been an Earth b-side; after this the album fully lurches into motion, rattling out of the speakers like a transmission from a lost colony of funky, acid-fried androids driven mad from an eternity drifting in a derelict space helmet with nothing but Hendrix records and millions of cigarettes to pass the time. Look into his eyes, people - do those crimson orbs look like windows into sanity?
I was initially quite overjoyed to discover this obscure slab of funereal doom based upon several lesser-known Lovecraftian works, but upon opening my mind to its dark whispers the horror of my situation was thrown into sharp relief. Paced as slowly as the passage of aeons, littered with cruel, unintelligible voices calling obscenities in forgotten languages, framed by seemingly random notes plucked out on dusty, detuned piano, and hinting unsubtly at a universe of more horrid things, The Sleeper in the Abyss is the last recorded testament of British hermit Methuselah. As to his whereabouts I cannot speak, but surely he must've been in the final stages of syphilitic insanity by the time of this recording, for it contains nary a shred of human warmth or sympathy. A cold, bleak void yawns outward from my headphones and into my ears.
Moving right along, here's a fairly recent album from Norse stalwarts Carpathian Forest, still cursing the name of god from their snow-blanketed mountainside encampment. Following a similar path to fellow pilgrims like Darkthrone and Impaled Nazarene, recent years find them devolving from haughty black metal fops into crusty old hill trolls, traveling backwards though time from Bathory and Discharge towards their common ancestor, Motörhead. Bits and pieces of each of these crop up in each song, and vocalist Nattefrost sounds like five different kinds of freak, echoing around through the songs like a berserker run amok in a church in the middle of the night.
Named for the actress known for her roles in everything from Easy Rider to Spinal Tap to Pootie Tang, and fronted by horror and porn star Kembra Pfahler, Karen Black (later known as The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black) was a wild art-damaged punk performance art troupe more than an actual band. Their live shows were dominated by body paint, nudity, props, and general chaos and thus the albums tend to be soundtracks that lose some impact out of context. This early seven inch record was released before they had fully developed and so contains two primitive, snarling abstract songs played by barely competent budding musicians. With some Dead Milkmen style in-song banter, Lou Reed speak-singing, Plasmatics power-plod, and Throbbing Gristle scrape, this is a good way to flay your mind open on one of those boring suburban nights. Could be the soundtrack to Kenneth Anger's Grease.
You can read my previous post on the Wrangler Brutes here. This is their LP, released shortly before their premature breakup. I haven't much time to expound on this one, but it's a sorely needed kick in the balls for your ears.
I suppose I should be impervious to the close-mindedness and xenophobia in the metal community after two decades, but it still strikes a nerve whenever I hear someone bitching about "that rap crap" - not only is it stupid to dismiss a form of music whose underground is as diverse and thriving as heavy metal's, but it often smacks of barely-suppressed racism as well. Seriously, judging an entire genre by what you hear on the radio is just as reductive as saying all heavy metal sounds like and is a valid as the faddish deathcore clones and seemingly unkillable nu-metal knuckledraggers that represent heavy metal to the straight world.
Remember way back when I was debating making a weekly feature of concept albums based upon At the Mountains of Madness? Well, it's probably a good thing I didn't, as I would have run out of material in a few months and my ability to consistently post anything has waxed and waned with the seasons to the point where I would have forgotten or given up before long anyway. So, in the spirit of keeping it loose-limbed and addle-brained, here's a wild one by psych rock ensemble Magic Lantern. I really know nothing about these guys other than the fact that they're from California, they sound sorta like Hawkwind, and they're probably hipsters but since they don't pretend to play heavy metal nobody gives a shit. This is two ten-plus minute songs that reverberate like the tiny army of UFOs buzzing around inside my skull, futilely attempting to escape back into their own parallel universe. 
