Three 6 Mafia - Mystic Stylez

Gravediggaz beat them by a year, but the debut album by Three 6 Mafia is perhaps the defining moment of horrorcore rap.  The filthy low budget production, the predilection for violent imagery, the revenge fantasies and the murky, cobwebby atmosphere that define the genre are all here in copious amounts.  Roughly equivelant to Scream Bloody Gore, the record still sounds menacing, vital, and prescient.

Now I'm Hi

Antonius Rex - Zora

While we're on the weird outer rims of heavy metal, let's stop over in darkest Italy, home to many truly bizarre bands of all sub-genres.  Antonius Rex, the brainchild of Jacula leader Antonio Bartoccetti and vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Doris Norton.  Of their many simultaneous projects, this is the darkest and most explicitly occult, enough so that they were dropped by their label and forced to self-release it in limited quantities some years later.  Mixing the baroque organ fugues and jazzy psych of Jacula with a cinematic adventurousness influenced by Goblin and Morricone, with the pair's sometimes distracting vocals and breathless narration kept to a minimum.  This version is a recent reissue containing the extended track listing of later versions but with the original, suppressed cover art intact.  One can hear influences on occult rock modern bands, especially Blood Ceremony, but nobody has the freeform batshit wildness of this monster.

Morte al Potere

The Old Ones - Manfred

I've been sifting through the archives this week, spurred on by sickness and cabin fever,  eventually arriving at a pile of poorly tagged, low quality mp3's of The Old Ones. Downloaded years ago from the baffling 9 Productions website ( seemingly a relic from 1994 but sporadically updated with new information, despite being 90% perpetually "under construction"), The Old Ones are a classic example of a one-man project driven by sheer love and madness, content to languish in obscurity and bereft of shame or self-awareness.  Existing for years on the same fringes of doom populated by Aarni or Brown Jenkins, this anonymous Czech fellow continues to make music under this moniker - there is another album and multiple singles, and a sequel to this semi-full length is promised sometime this year.  This one is a bit of a mess - I corrected the incoherent tags as best I could, but the volume is wildly erratic, the guitars are tinny and muffled except for the occasional solo, the vocals are too loud, and the drum machine is laughable.  Still, crazy-eyed ambition and enthusiasm go a long way in bands like this, and The Old Ones have no shortage of either.  

I Remember

Dope on the Scarecrow

I've been an Angry Samoans fan for over fifteen years, and as time grinds on I find myself beginning to understand the later, stranger work of fucked up front man Metal Mike Saunders.  I mean, Back From Samoa is an all time classic, and even the second album STP Not LSD seems less baffling and more amusing and memorably nutty in hindsight.  By the time this weird seven inch record arrived in 1996, the rest of the original lineup was long gone, as were all of their replacements - in fact, this is just Mike on guitar and vocals.  

Saunders was one of those characters too fucked to play drums but charismatic enough to be a "singer," like Joey Ramone or Iggy Pop.  The first Samoans show was as the opening band for Roky Erickson, and his twitchy shadow looms long over their style: surreal, horror-movie influenced lyrics and a complete lack of self-editing, combined with a youthful enthusiasm for weird drugs and fifties pop.  Once Mike's bandmates had jumped ship he was left with the name and without anybody to tell him NO.

So we arrive years later at this thing.  Side one is a loose parody of the John Cougar Mellencamp song "Rain on the Scarecrow," but instead of lamenting the plight of the modern farmer, it's a jab at recently croaked Grateful Dead slob Jerry Garcia.  On the surface it seems like an anti-dope song, but Saunder's long history of drug abuse is obvious not only to those aware of the band's career arc, but also to anyone with a pair of ears and a copy of this record.  The flipside is a similarly warped cover of "Heroin" by the Velvet Underground, likely cribbed from Roky's cover, which fades into another Coug joke. 

So why does this record exist?  Saunders is no stranger to drugs, and sports a giant mane of hair that probably stank worse than The Stooges.  He can barely keep his guitar in tune and both of the songs he's parodying are old news, even in '96.  The answer is in the grooves, though, I can feel it.  Better listen to it again...

They took away my dope

The took away my pride

And now the pigs are chasing me

They think my brains are fried

Fishing with John

This is the soundtrack to the cult television show "Fishing with John," starring John Lurie.  Taking the loose framework of a PBS nature show and twisting it into a hilarious beatnik riff on culture shock, cryptozoology, manliness, booze, frenetic dancing, and the nature of sport, the six extant episodes stand as one of the weirdest TV experiments ever.  With guests like Tom Waits, Willem Defoe, Dennis Hopper, and Jim Jarmusch, and wild expressionist music by Lurie's many amorphous jazz combos, it's settling nicely right now with the mixture of whiskey and cough syrup fueling your helpless narrator's feverish battle with Mother Nature herself, also nicely reflecting the over-arching theme of the show.  Perhaps tomorrow will find me more lucid, or perhaps floating face down in an icy bog somewhere.

Ahhhhhh.....

Spvcxghsztpvrrp - Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6

Miami's teenage horror rapper Spaceghostpurrp has released what may well be the year's darkest and strangest mixtape,  Blvcklvnd Rvdix 66.6.  Sounding like it was recorded on a tiny, busted cassette player and liberally slathered in Godzilla and Mortal Kormbat samples, and as murky and uncommercial as any deliberately obscure black metal kvlt, this bloated monstrosity is a purple smear of ugliness, a robotussin stain on the plush carpet of hipster rap.  It's anti-social, unfiltered, and wallowing in sociapathic obscurity.

SVCK V DICK FXR 2011

Törr - Armageddon

Behold, Swamplings!  Tonight I bring you another classic from the first wave of black metal, Törr's Armageddon.  Unsurprisingly there is a large debt to Venom, from the primitive stomp of the music to the horny cheeseball sense of humor.  All of the lyrics are Czech, but it doesn't take a genius to tell what they're singing about: Sex, Satan, and Doom.  A wide variety of songs, abundant sampling and experimental noise, and a lecherous leer give the album a distinct personality, and the thrashy heaviness it counterbalanced with catchy songwriting. Its' the kind of album that makes you want to sing along, even the if the words are in a foreign language and probably terrible anyway.

Žal

Hawkwind - The Chronicle of the Black Sword

Finally, a quiet night in the Swamp with which to gather my thoughts.  At the end of another week of madness I must alter my state of mind with the aid of The Chronicle of the Black Sword.  Few people have love for mid-80's Hawkwind, but I am one of those few - at least for this album.  A concept album grounded squarely in Michael Moorcock's Elric cycle, the tone matches that of its source material - brooding, expansive, iconoclastic, and unrelentingly grim. Moorcock's albino swordsman was a loner anti-hero, an alien among his own people;  by 1985 Dave Brock was the only original member, a relic from another era.  

Still, the album sounds fairly in line with the times - as heavy as contemporary records by the crop of aging first-wave metal bands inspired by Hawkwind back in the day, and mercifully mostly free of cheesy eighties production.  Granted, there's a bubbly synth here or there, or the occasional too-long guitar noodle, but it's not like the group were ever particularly known for their restraint and focus.  Brock's vocals sound a bit strained and haggard, too, but this adds a weight and world-weariness to the proceedings, fitting with its downbeat lyrics and bleak worldview. 

Interestingly, the band performed the album in it's entirety on the tour, with an elaborate stage production and Moorcock himself narrating.  I haven't watched the recently released DVD, but there's some wild and hilarious videos out there for perusal.  They're a million light years from 1969, but the interval has only made them weirder.

I heard a murmuring in the night

Deceased - Supernatural Addiction

Alas, wee ones,  I must away forthwith for a day or two!  Focus your minds together on this, my favorite album by Virginia's unkillable death/thrash misanthropes, Deceased.  Supernatural Addiction is perhaps my favorite among their peerless discography (although one can't go wrong with any of their various albums).  Loosely themed around various notably works of short horror, from the glorious "The Doll With the Hideous Spirit" from Richard Matheson's famous "Prey," and its bloodthirsty Zuni Fetish Doll, to "Dark Chilling Heartbeat" based on Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart."  Each song is a gem on its own, but taken as a whole they add up to a Tales From The Crypt-style anthology of horrid tales of revenge an comeuppance. 

The music?  Ah, yes.  This isn't the most brutal Deceased record by a long shot, but the ambitious texture and range are breathtaking, unfolding from the crusher opening of "The Premontion" into a complex mix of not only death and thrash but hints of psych, punk, doom, and weirder territories.  Even the longest songs are perpetually forward-moving and fat-free, anchored by the excellent and instantly recognizable vocals of drummer King Fowley.  Deceased is one of those bands like Slough Feg or Primordial, seemingly content to stake out their own plot of metal soil and crank out album after album of quality music, impervious to trends and inertia.

Will we ever open our minds to greet a world beyond?

The "Priest" They Called Him

It's been a moment since I dropped any William S. Burroughs material, so have this ten inch record of Uncle Bill reading his excellent short "The "Priest" They Called Him" with the squealing guitar background created by one Kurt Cobain.  A harrowing tale of a junkie at Christmas, a pair of severed legs, and the immaculate fix, punctuated by Cobain's "Silent Night"-based noise wall, this little miracle is as ultimately hopeful as it is nauseating.  Sweat it out.

Fight tuberculosis, folks...

Jack Starr - Born Petrified

Not to be confused with the guy from Virgin Steele, this Jack Starr is a Texas-bred rockabilly outsider and monster-movie director, famed for his dark, twisted music and larger-than-life persona.   A marvel of ingenuity, this album reflects the duct-taped mentality one would assume prevailed upon his seemingly lost filmography as well: glaringly home-made, using an old bathtub as an echo chamber, varying wildly in quality and length, at once charming and unsettling.  Given a dusty ambiance by the tinny, distant sound and Starr's nasally wail, the songs float among a sea of hiss and ectoplasm, sounding a good thirty years older than their sixties vintage. 

It's the little seat-of-the-pants details that really give the record depth - for example, "Done Away With the Mean Old Blues" contains a middle passage that sounds like Starr playing piano with one hand and slapping his leg in counter-rhythm with the other.  Occasionally the recording descend into frenzied gibberish worthy of Men's Recovery Project at their most obtuse.  Other moments offer pure, fragile beauty and joy.  And then there's the songs about vampires and shit, those are good too.

Constellation of a Fool

The Vindictives - Leave Home

Sure, there's lots of knock-off Ramones bands, Ramones cover bands, and bands who cover Ramones songs, but how many people just up and cover a whole album front to back?  Chicago's legendarily neurotic Vindictives do this, and maintain a level of spontaneity and pranksterism that elevates it to the level of Dada Not Doodoo.

You should have never opened that door...

Abgott - Artefacts of Madness

Proving the old adage about the weirdest of metal coming out of Italy, Abgott's complex, mathy black metal is thoroughly constructed and precise.  There's hints of that Meshugga-derived irregular chug, Enslaved's epic sweep, and the sheer nuttiness of early Voivod, combined with a Lovecraftian lyrical bent.  For all the clinicism of the playing, there's still a nasty heft here, a mad whirl of rage usually absent from today's technical death metal scene.  Abgott are no theoreticians or hipster music school dropouts - this is the real deal, and it is scary.

Diabolical Surgery

Brotha Lynch Hung - Season of da Siccness

It's one of those nights, my dearies, where only the ugliest and most twisted horrorcore can satisfy the dark urges roiling within. Brotha Lynch Hung's pet themes - cannibalism, mysogyny, madness, infanticide, booze - all permeate this miasmal gangsta record like smoke from a funeral pyre. A west coast answer to the New York's burgeoning horror rap movement, this first LP sounds like a hybrid of the G-Funk synth-and-melodica slink and the menacing funk of a John Carpenter soundtrack. This is roughly the rap equivalent to Butchered at Birth. Tread cautiously.
Rest in Piss

Primordial - The Gathering Wilderness

You may have noticed some gaps in posting happening lately, especially on the weekends. This sort of unexplained gap is not uncommon for your host, but I've decided to shift into quality-over-quantity mode. I am usually able to post throughout the week, and sporadically on weekends, but I'm going to have to try to make the most of my free time and only post when I actually have something to say, at least until the end of summer.

That said, there's no better introduction to this new mode than Primordial, one of my long time favorites and a band that stays in constant rotation in the Swamp, staving off the darkness. Frequently described as Celtic/folk/black metal (a combination of modifiers that would normally cause me to stay far, far away), Ireland's most reliable and perhaps longest running metal act is really an entity unto itself. Beginning with this album, they venture more into Slough Feg-styled epic heaviness unburdened by cheap genre tags or gimmickry. While still venturing on occasion into blast beat/tremolo territory for effect, this is really a study in massive melodic force. Steered by leather-lunged A.A. Nemtheanga (of Blood Revolt) and anchored by a water-tight rhythm section, Primodial's twin guitarists weave Celtic themes and melancholy lyricism into the black metal framework the way Thin Lizzy did for hard rock way back in the day. In fact you can almost sense a sort of spiritual kinship between "The Coffin Ships" or "Cities Carved in Stone" and Lizzy's Irish folk influence.

I chose this album because it's the first one where the mix felt perfectly balanced for me. The earlier albums are crushingly heavy and much closer to standard blackness, and the ones following this continue down this path with increasing focus and steely-eyed warrior spirit. Every single one of them is good, though, especially this year's "Redemption at the Puritan's Hand." Take heart.
Oh god, that bread should be so dear
And human flesh so cheap

Tight Bros From Way Back When - Take You Higher

Featuring past members of Karp and Behead the Prophet and future members of Big Business/Melvins and Nudity, the Tight Bros sounded nothing like any of that stuff. Instead they cranked out a sweaty mix of AC/DC and MC5, singing of fire and blood and rock and roll. This particular seven inch EP is included here for the apocalypse anthem "Chicken Little Lied," but I highly recommend both of their albums and split with The Champs as premier examples of hard rock/punk rock done right with zero cheese or smarm.
I'm in luck

In the year 3030

A classic of dystopian hip-hop, a peak album in a tiny sub-genre that soon spiraled into self-parody and cheap commercialism, an Orwellian prophecy of end times, and a hilarious send-up of corny sci-fi movies, 3030 is a must for any student of The Apocalypse. This album is a distinct product of the waning of the happy-go-lucky Clinton era and the approaching of the turbulent first decade of a new millennium, heralded by Y2K paranoia and a radical rightwards swing in American politics. 9/11 was over a year away when this was released - I find it odd that this record can stand as a nerdy bit of weedian self-indulgence and simultaneously as a bold premonition of war.
Madness

Hellride Jailbreak

Frankly, it's impossible for me to imagine a cross-section of Swamp readers. In my mind you're all a wonderful blob of indescribable stench and horror, but there must be somebody paying attention out there, yes? For those loyal seedlings that are fans of both Thin Lizzy and Wesley Willis, or those just toeing the waters of madness and hilarity, or those lamenting the state of humanity and curling up all fetal-like, take heart. Sometimes the stars shall align in your favour, even if it's only for four minutes and twenty seconds. Tonight there's going to be a jailbreak, probably at the jail.
Have it your own fucked up way.

Fex Urbis Lex Orbis

This is probably old news to many of you by now, but I just found out that Ludicra, one of the best and longest-running American black metal bands (and one of my favorites), has broken up. I haven't the energy to expound too much on this yet - it's already been a long day and I've just arrived back in the Swamp - but I wish the respective members the best in the future and hope to see more music from each of them. There is that Hammers of Misfortune album due this year...
Collapse

Cenotaph - The Lurking Fear on Desecrated Ground

There are at least a dozen bands named Cenotaph - this one is the Italian death metal band who eventually wised up and changed their moniker to Necrosphere, which is only marginally better. Anyway, this brief demo contains three songs and the seemingly obligatory intro noodling, in just under twelve minutes. This is 1991, so death metal is still in its embryonic stage as a thrash metal offshoot, and this tape accordingly reflects that. Keening high-pitched thrash shouting alternates with death growl, tempos remain at full gallop throughout, and no song is longer than four and a half minutes. Still, we get some excellent Lovecraftian themes and atmosphere and a raw, bullshit-free bite-size lump of madness.
Perpetual Wars on Cerebral Shores