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.  

Dead Death Dead Death Dead Death 

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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

Aggressive - Predator's Arrival

Just stopping by for a moment to drop this bizarre monstrosity on you before it's too late.  Columbia's Aggressive play an oddball mutant thrash, musically more in line with the gibbering weirdness of The Accused than the more meat-and-potatoes nuclear stuff most retro-bands are ripping off these days, with a wild vocalist and hints of gang-chorus hardcore, proto-death, grind, and NWOBHM.  All of this, plus one of the best album covers of the year.  

Corrosive Entertainment

Peter Wyngarde - When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head

Tonight we have the mad album When Sex Leers Its Inquisitive Head by British TV actor Peter Wyngarde.  Originally commissioned by RCA to cash in on his popularity, it was released and quickly withdrawn a week later.  Presumably nobody had actually listened to it prior to its release.  Instead of the requested set of easy listening tunes, Wyngarde delivered a series of wild, pervy spoken word rants, backed by wild free-form noise jazz, tribal drums, lustful moaning, and shouts of exultation.  It's practically impossible to describe the myriad fragments sufficiently, and it boggles the mind to think of how this got made in the first place.  One of a kind, for sure.

Hippie and the Skinhead

Eibon - Entering Darkness

Eibon, not to be confused with the Phil Anselmo/Fenriz band, is a French doom act named after Clark Ashton Smith's Book of Eibon, a tome of great and terrible power.  Fittingly, the music they play is hypnotic and repulsive, a black tar pit full of bones.  Sludgy vocals alternate with frenzied, barely audible sounds of panic and madness, as if the narrator was slowly losing his mind.  The occasional blast beat/tremolo part crops up from time to time, but only to heighten the weighty slowness of the rest of the album.   A must have, one of my favorite releases of last year.

Path to Oblivion

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...

Pentagram - Sub-Basement

Much like this imperfect but undervalued Pentagram album, I have spent many decades in the dank underground today, and I only just re-emerge under the deadline to slime out this gibberish upon my keyboard and hope that it reaches some vigilant ears somewhere out in the cosmos before I dissolve into an unrecognizable jelly and the tide goes too far out.
Sub-Intro

A Forest of Stars - The Corpse of Rebirth

After another strange weekend lost in the wilds exploring the outer edges of human consciousness and endurance, I once again return to the Swamp and to my beloved little ones. I bring with me this strange album of psychedelic black metal - not of the cosmic Orannsi Pazuzu variety (which I dearly love as well), but of the extremely British tea-and-crumpets-spiked-with-datura flavor. Over several lengthy songs - only one is under ten minutes - the group seems to flirt and tease at the edges of the genre, only occasionally careening into pure blastbeat-and-wailing territory before wildly veering off on a tangent of one sort or another, many involving violins and and other non-kvlt flourishes. Still, there's plenty of darkness and sinister subtext here for those willing to brave a bit of foppery to flay open the raw and wild things that lay at the core of this music.
Frozen in thought whilst seeking oblivion.

RIP Wild Man Fischer

The Monkey and the Donkey

Nightmare!

Here's a moody little slice of cinematic horror jazz from Creed Taylor and his orchestra, simultaneously oozing hepcat cool and slithery menace. The third of three collaborations with film composer Kenny Hopkins, these albums are not connected to specific films but based on short horror stories and classic monster archetypes. Anticipating much strange fringe music of the next fifty years, the mix of creaky sound effects with abstract tone poems and lounge rhythm, along with occasional muffled voices, creates a delightfully eerie atmosphere that must've been a riot at cocktail parties and secretive black masses alike.
Red Eyed Rats

Black Land - Extreme Heavy Psych

Yet another self-explanatory doom album, but keep in mind that the Italians tend to do it weirder than anybody. So, how far out are you ready to go? Some minimal research reveals a mysterious history of typical opaque personal weedian occultism:
"....at the beginning the band started experimenting by fusing sounds of stoner and heavy psychedelic rock with the typical reflexive mysticism of doom, and it’s from those atmospheres and by the convergence of each own personal background that Black Land’s songs took their origin.
The first “confused” exibitions took place mostly in squats, and other underground locations in Rome and in the rest of Italy (without producing any record or demo)."
Gibberish or genius? Remember that Italian metal is famous for both.
Holy Weed of the Cosmos

Roky Erickson - More Power to You

Another semi-legitimate Roky release from the fan club here, with some stuff you can't find anywhere else and also the absolute best version of "Cold Night for Alligators" I've ever heard. Also included is some prime Roky-gibberish and general silliness, just for good measure.
I Love the Blind Man

Arena

We have what I believe is a Swamp exclusive tonight, my little ones: the sole recording by defunct two-man cosmic psych unit Arena. Theirs is a difficult sound to summarize, with parts of it variously reminding me of Chrome or Krautrock or Hawkwind with the occasional Nick Blinko or robot vocal creeping up low in the mix. Of course there are also hints of Goblin and John Carpenter soundtracks - in fact several of these tracks appeared on the soundtrack to the low-budget horror flick Wanderlost. Most of the proggish tendencies are sublimated to open up space for the yawning atmospheric void and groovy rhythms. All in all it's a shame this project ended so quickly, but at least we have this relic from beyond space and time.
Bastards of the Omniverse

Los Punk Rockers

I don't know for sure, but this album seems to have the slimy fingerprints of schlock-meister El Chalpin all over it. Basically what we have is a complete re-recording of the Sex Pistols' Never Mind the Bullocks in bizarre Spanglish by a band of anonymous studio hacks. Chalpin, you may remember, was responsible for the vast ocean of posthumous Hendrix bootlegs as well as the notorious Thin Lizzy "Funky Junction" album and that psychedelic Chubby Checker record I posted a while back, among other things.

These recordings have an off-the-cuff, manic quality not present in the original album, likely due equally to the one-day recording turnover and the singer's shaky grasp of English and loose approximations of the chord progressions, which often sound like the work of some arty post-punk band. When paired with the tinny, trebly recording and hilariously misheard lyrics, we have an instant cult classic and proof that sometimes greed and cynicism can still produce great things, albeit inadvertently.
No Future in England's Greenland

Moses - Changes

Bad vibrations rattling around in my skull tonight, tamed only by the sweet Danish thugs in Moses. This is dirty brown acid and homemade speed for slack-jawed fans of Blue Cheer, Crushed Butler, or Speed, Glue and Shinki. Caveman brows furrowed in frustration, beady eyes staring into the void, these subnormal hair farmers mix in some menacing jazz breaks and blues shuffle owing more to John Lee Hooker than Hendrix, but there's plenty of psychedelic weirdness for those late nights too. Refreshingly these all appear to be original songs, too, with nary a honkified Chuck Berry or Bo Diddley to be found.
Everything is Changed

Roger Miller - Golden Hits

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.

Sure enough, he got caught and, rather going to jail, chose to join the army, where he simultaneously discovered speed and honed his defense against adversity by perfecting his hilarious but complex brand of country music. After many years of struggle he became Johnny Cash's speed dealer and was thusly capulted into stardom, eventually resulting in the erosion of his sharper, amphetamine-induced edges and then his famous soundtrack for Disney's Robin Hood. One would think that he would've peacefully died when his head exploded while driving a tiger around in his big-ass Cadillac, but he lived long enough to pay for the fifteen packs of cigarettes he smoked every day for fifty years.

Not to belabor the point, but I don't normally traffic in "Greatest Hits" albums in the Swamp. However, every single song on here is awesome and the individual albums tend to be full of filler and covers. Just listen to this, and keep your eye out next time you go out looking for something to help you forget the shame.
Atta Boy Girl

Methuselah - The Sleeper in the Abyss

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.
Ecce Lex

Karen Black

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.
Cleaner than what?

Zulu

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.
Things get fruity