Roky Erickson - The Evil One

Counting down to my 500th post and perusing the archives lately has brought to light some glaring oversights, albums I haven't posted yet that form the backbone of my musical taste.  Many of these (this one included) have remained un-posted because I listen to them so much that I can't imagine life without them.

The first one that came to mind was The Evil One, the most well known and arguably the best album by Roky Erickson.  I have posted many Roky albums here before and casually assumed that anyone perusing my little Swamp would at least have a passing familiarity with the man.  A huge percentage of albums on here are directly influenced by him, and many others have a spiritual kinship in their themes of paranormal phenomena, struggles with madness, and weird gibberish.

Lyrically, Roky draws from vintage horror movies and urban legends as much as he uses early rock n' roll's predilection for mantra-like refrains and cribbed blues motifs.  Musically, it's basically Buddy Holly and Bo Diddley squeezed through a proto-punk meat grinder.  Creedence Clearwater Revival's Stu Cook played bass on and produced much of this album, lending a layer of cosmic hillbilly mystique to a record already doomed to obscurity.

Of course now Roky is known as an essential part of any rock fan's collection and he continues to produce new material, against all odds, but this is the pinnacle.

I Walked With a Zombie

Gorilla Angreb

Copenhagen's Gorilla Angreb played a ragged, boozy mix of old L.A. punk in the style of X and mid-nineties garage scum.  Once again the lyrics are impenetrable to me but the sound and sentiment transcend my limited faculties, speaking the universal tongue of rage, sweat, love, and spittle.  This is their entire recorded discography minus some live material, and essential listening for keeping out of the cold.

På Patrulje

Melvins - The Undisputed Renegade Spaghetti Garage Pin-Ups

Here's another fairly thorough all-covers bootleg, this time from the mighty Melvins. Flipper, Wipers, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd, Wendy Carlos, Fleetwood Mac, Malfunkshun, Warlock Pinchers even...something for everybody, mangled and stomped on. Interestingly, though this album is two full-length discs, many of The Melvins' better known covers don't appear here, perhaps assuming that anybody who would bother with
something this weird already owns them. It's a bit difficult to sit through the entire two hours, but there's tons of mixtape fodder and surprisingly reverent treatment, representing the breadth and depth of their influences.
Jerkin' Krokus

No Heavy Petting

Another under-heard gem from the Schenker era of UFO, No Heavy Petting may be in fact their strongest long player and contains multiple songs that stayed in their live set for decades, as evidenced on the fabulous live album Strangers in the Night. Opening with the one-two punch of riff-steamroller "Natural Thing" and schizoid "I'm a Loser," and following with the Motörhead/Stooges-uppercut of "Can You Roll Her," side A is a bleak tour through England's seamy rock-n-roll underbelly. That's a song about addiction (presumably dedicated to the woman on the cover with a monkey on her back), a song about couch-surfing, and a song presumably about sketchy blacked-out sex, right in a row. The rest of the record goes off on a few wild tangents, including the moody, proto-stoner street rumble "On With the Action" and the cosmic homesickness of "Martian Landscape," perhaps betraying a longing for UFO's past as a hippyish, happy-drug space rock band. That's not to say there's no filler on this - the junkie love ballad "Belladonna" and the throwaway cover of "A Fool in Love" could've been trimmed, but how many 70's albums are free of fluff? None!
Home taping is killing the bullshit industry

Bllleeeeaaauuurrrrgghhh!

I'm posting on a quick break from other realms with but precious minutes to spare, which is probably what made me think of this, the pinnacle achievement of powerviolence-mongers Slap-A-Ham. 84 songs in 12 minutes: grind, noise, sludge, poop.
Go Human Not Ape

Vortex - Colours From Out the Emptiness

We've got another squirmy bit of Japanese metal on the plate tonight, and no matter how many times you stab this one with a fork, it won't stop wriggling! Mysterious tech-death savants Vortex paint hallucinatory hell-scapes with their music, an elaborate calligraphy of brutality writ larger than can easily be comprehended. This one's a real brain-twister, the total opposite of yesterday's cock-puncher; it rarely settles into a riff or idea for long, preferring to twist and twine inward in impossibly complex knots, before occasionally unraveling out into the beyond and back. I suppose that eye-singeing awful cover is an attempt to render the alien hues from "The Colour Out of Space," which the title of this album mangles wonderfully, but there's a lot going on below the skin besides your standard Lovecraftianism: the first song references Japanese Noh playwright Zeati Motokiyo, Egyptian god of air Shu, and satellite surveillance (and briefly slips from ESL into German). The odds are good that this is a concept album of some sort, but I can find little trace of this band's existence, let alone a manifesto, so who knows? Make up your own.
I know your name - The hate
The waste - The aged ape

Wrangler Brutes - Cassette

Oops, I seem to have missed a day again. Oh well, let's post something extra-tasty to make up for it. Wrangler Brutes was the short-lived project of Sam MecPheeters, of Born Against and Men's Recovery Project notoriety, with members of weird bands such as the Monorchid and Skull Kontrol. Fully embracing niether the hardcore-turned-dada of BA nor the synthesized bloops and bleeps of MRP, Wrangler Brutes teetered on a precarious balance of bass-driven rhythm and scraping, almost abstract guitar noise, with McPheeters howling madly atop it like a crazed baboon. Idiot savants or history's greatest monsters?
You decide

The Mummies - Tales From the Crypt

I probably haven't posted enough Mummies records yet, considering the massive back-catalog they have out of print, so here's a festive little one for you. Recorded for Sympathy for the Record Industry at some point in the 90's, this album was rejected by the Mummies as sounding too good, and never officially released. Fortunately many anonymous bootleg editions appeared in record stores immediately afterwards, properly tinny and warped. My original copy of this was on vinyl so thin that it was translucent in daylight and peeled off in slivers from the pressure of the stylus. In keeping with that downward momentum, here's some shitty mp3s and a jpeg.
You're so full of shit your eyes are brown.

Deadbolt - Haight Street Hippie Massacre

Normally I'm not a "best-of" type of listener, preferring the album format and so on, but this collection of songs seems to work well together, and makes this a decent place to start before one dips into Deadbolt's vast array of releases. Deadbolt, you see, is a burly and bizarre hybrid of surf rock, death punk, early rock n' roll, and hints of Morricone-esque spaghetti western flavor. If that sounds uninteresting, consider also their live show in which power tools collide and sparks reign down on the audience, and their tongue-in-cheek themes of revenge, voodoo, violence, freight train gang war, and speed-addled truck driver misanthropy. Add to this the fact that there's two bass players and everyone in the band is a big fat bastard, and you've got a recipe for flaming disaster.
Watongo!

(You Must Fight To Live) On The Planet Of The Apes

Lurching forth from their sarcophagi, The Mummies, clad in the moldering rags of ancient finery, spin a tale of madness: Mankind has been conquered and enslaved by filthy apes, reduced to dumb servility. One lone man stands against an army of soldier apes on horseback, his fist raised in defiance, and cries:
"No!"