Friday, December 2, 2011

Rudimentary Peni - Cacophony

Well, we arrive at the 500th post and so I give you Rudimentary Peni's aptly titled Cacophony.  Notable as not only one of the most vital and well known works of Lovecraftian music but also as one of the most insane, terrifying things ever committed to wax, it is largely responsible for my fascination with the Mythos and therefore for the existence of this Swamp.  A sharp departure from the band's bleak anarcho-punk sound and long held to be an account of Peni frontman Nick Blinko losing his mind, these songs seem like random fragments stitched together and pasted to a padded wall inside a cell.  

There a hints of punk and hardcore, shimmering instrumental exploration, drinking songs, collages of mad noise, multi-tracked gibbering, morbid story-songs, threatening doggerel, and references to (and jokes about) nearly every facet of Lovecraft's work.  Much of this is driven by Blinko's horrific vocals, which range from cheeseball operatics to metallic growls, from snotty punk taunting to inhuman gurgling, often simultaneously.  Famously, one interlude is composed of a choir of clacking, gnashing teeth; another is a melange of wheezes and death rattles.  It's hard to believe it all came from one man.  The album is overstuffed, impenetrable, and baroque, in sharp contrast with the minimalist path the band followed afterwards - it's as if all the horrid knowledge in the universe flooded out from between Blinko's jaws.  

6 comments:

  1. Congrats on the 500th post, what a great album to celebrate with! One of my favorite tracks on Cacophony is 'Imps of the Perverse', which I recently found was partially sourced from a 60s review by Avram Davidson. Here's a reprint - http://www.avramdavidson.org/ephemera.htm#HPL

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  2. Ah, I've always wondered what that text was from. The booklet that comes with this LP thoroughly documents every word and gurgle Blink commits to record but does not give sources for any of it. Thanks for the link, interesting stuff.

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  3. Sadly tracks 11 and 22 not working (at least for me). Thanks for this and all the other great stuff and don't mean to complain.

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