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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Poison Idea - Feel the Darkness

Here's another one that helped cultivate the Swamp we lurk in: Feel the Darkness by Poison Idea.  One of the few hardcore to bands to be legitimately terrifying in their day, Poison Idea consistently put out the best and toughest records of any punk band for years, peaking with this one.  Lacing their sinister, complex hardcore with greasy blues and classic rock riffs, they practically kick their way into the room through your speakers, stomping all over your shitty record collection.  Singer Jerry A. tackles what seems to be the day-to-day grind for the band: drugs, crime, cops, and alienation, and behind the punk doggerel he sneaks in quite a bit of bleak poetry.  Literally, the heaviest band on the planet.

RIP Pig Champion

Fearless Vampire Killers - Target

Another knock-off band on the turntable tonight - this time it's the Japanese Bad Brains, Fearless Vampire Killers. Not quite up to the standard of their inspiration, especially in the vocal department, this is nonetheless a raging buzzsaw of hyperactive punk fast enough to sand the zits off your face.
All you offend to my eyes

H.C. Minds - The Beginning of the End

Like many of you, I have been basking in the dark radiation of the new Yob album repeatedly for the last several days. I'm not going to post it, but I will unleash this monstrosity from H.C. Minds, for which Mike Scheidt and Travis Foster of Yob once played. While HCM trades in a crusty doom style not dissimilar to Yob, it is nonetheless more filthy, nasty, and preoccupied with apocalyptic matters, making it right at home here in the Swamp. Elements of the nastiest Amebix-worship hardcore creep in around the edges too, lending a particular stink to the proceedings. Lots of ugliness, nihilism, and pessimism here, oh joy.
Land of the Wargoat

Winds of Genocide

I have returned from beyond! Apologies for the unexpected interruption, but it wouldn't be properly Lovecraftian without a few mysterious vanishings from time to time, now would it? Anyway, I come bearing strange fruit: some brutal death/crust from the UK, exclusively themed around the collapse of civilization. There's a good bit of Discharge-styled d-beat and some Autopsy-like primitive gurgling, but I also get a nice Aura Noir/Midnight black'n'roll vibe as well - all in all a swirling black cloud of nihilism shot through with lightning bolts of doom.
In The Shadow Of The Scythe Of Death

Poison Idea - Darby Crash Rides Again

Take these early demos of Poison Idea, including some that were never re-recorded, and shove 'em up your listen hole, you stooge!

Give it Up

Fuck You All

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.
Evil Egocentrical Existencialism

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

BBQ Chickens - Fine Songs, Playing Sucks

Here is a wacko Roiobison, Backstreet Boys, Sham 69 to Sesame Street, songs ranging from Black Sabbath in Exodus, an album of covers from this Japanese hardcore band freak. Really strange, more diverse and more fun than it has a right to. These "Japan only" One can guess, I can do something worth less than this it?
Buffalo Soldier

Sutek Conspiracy

Quickly now: Sutek Conspiracy was a blistering hardcore project featuring one Leila Rauf of Saros, Memento Mori and Amber Asylum fame. This is a fan-made discography compilation. You need this, stop reading and download.
I Still Can't Stand Up Straight

Pure Hell - Noise Addiction

Recorded in 1978 but unreleased until 28 years later, Philly's Pure Hell intended this as the follow-up to their only single, but numerous difficulties, ranging from drugs, personal infighting, sexual misconduct, to rampaging egomania, combined to form an impenetrable barrier to productivity, not to mention racism inside and outside of the punk scene. Pure Hell predated Bad Brains by at least three years, arguably making them the earliest all-black punk band. Hearing it now, though, is a revelation: this album is wildly forward thinking, combining the twin-guitar noisy classicism of the Voidoids with the big choruses and scrappy energy of the Replacements, but already pushing towards the speed and brevity of hardcore. A professed favorite of luminaries like Lemmy Kilmister and Phil Lynott, this is yet another case of boundless potential squashed under the blunt thumb of human stupidity and shortsightedness. And yet, here is the record, intact and bracing 30 years later.
Rot in the Doghouse

It's Casual - Stop Listening To Bad Music

Self-explanatory.

Feederz - Teachers in Space

Boom! This is the second album by notorious Arizona punk contras The Feederz, widely reviled because of their confrontational Situationist pose, their antagonism towards their peers, and their grating, exhausting music. Less talked about than their stellar debut, "Ever Feel Like Killing Your Boss?," this LP is stranger and more uneven, with two intro tracks and a song from the "Alice in Wonderland" soundtrack opening the record before things fully get into gear. Various other intentionally confounding moments occur throughout, but then we also have moments of pure creepy joy like the Manson-stare love song "Crawlspace," a black comedy mutation of "Sixteen Tons," and the gleeful revenge fantasy "Taking the Night." Obnoxious front man Frank Discussion pioneered the whole righteous-ideopathic-anger-devolved-into-dada-nonsense arc a decade before Born Against or Rush Limbaugh.
Golden Venus Jim Beam Leisure World

Blind Idiot God

From deep within the bowels of the SST back catalog comes Blind Idiot God, an instrumental experimental metal band named for the Mad Demon Sultan swirling oblivious in the roiling nuclear heart of the universe, ringed by hideous pipers dancing and trilling. In keeping with this, the noise they create is decidedly non-linear and deliberately unpredictable, swerving wildly from atonal clatter to dubbed-out black vacuums of space to passages of fragile, terrible beauty. This wild stylistic flailing is held in check somewhat by the bands roots in the hardcore scene, which helps prevent the album from sounding like the mathy crossover metal bands that followed in the wake of this debut, who often mistake complex arrangement for actual songwriting, for conveying depth and dynamic and more nebulous, nameless concepts. To these ears, many modern explorers of this type of transcendental hypno-metal such as Krallice and Orthrelm owe a debt to these gentlemen, as do I. So shall you.
Ye blind idiot, ye noxious Azathoth shal arise from ye middle of ye World where all is Chaos & Destruction where He hath bubbl'd and blasphem'd at Ye centre which is of All Things, which is to say Infinity....

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

S.O.B. - Don't Be Swindle

This, wee one, is the first LP by Japan's Sabotage Organized Barbarian. One of Japan's first practitioners of grind, S.O.B. perfected a unique thrashy sound replete with stop-on-a-dime spazzouts, mid-tempo creeping, and nigh-unintelligible shout-along choruses. In addition, some of their records featured guest spots by such grind luminaries as Lee Dorrian and Shane Embury - a fine pedigree for any band playing this style. Sadly, original vocalist Tottsuan became one of a long line of Japanese subway suicides in 1995. S.O.B. continued without him into strange experimental directions, but in my mind this LP perfectly sums up their early sound and radiates personality, humor, and rage in equal parts.
Let's go Beach!

Vault Dweller - Messenger of Doom

Salem, Oregon's crusty dread-mulleted doomsayers Vault Dweller unleash this sludgy behemoth of an album out into the arid wastes, radiating deadly hate and face-melting tongue-in-cheek humor. The music is a hybrid of stoner mid-temp swagger and chaotic blastbeat hardcore, with lyrical subjects such as mutation, human extinction, and the hilariouly to-the-point "Thunderdome." Not the most distinctive or memorable album, as most of the songs sound interchangeable, but there's a good bit of wit and panache on display for those willing to listen.
Two men enter. One man leaves.

Ydintuho - Demo

Look at that cover! How could I possibly resist? Finland's Ydintuho (which translates at "Nuclear Destruction") crank out some thrashy crust spasms of radioactive hate centered lyrically (I would assume) around that icon of the twentieth century, the almighty mushroom cloud. Beautiful ugliness, gurgled in rapidly dissolving throats.
Ughrlrghl

Okkultokrati - No Light For Mass

One last quickie post before the end of the party: Norway's Okkultokrati, a sublimely heavy sludge-filled donut. This is another brand new one, so buy it here if possible (though they should look into getting better US distribution). In the meantime, enjoy these self described "nekro spirituals" about "astral molesting and telepathic deportation."
Promise Me The World (So I Can Destroy It)

Kvelertak - Westcoast Holocaust

In light of their recent self-titled full length release I feel comfortable pushing this three year old demo out of the nest and into the void. Kvelertak (Norwegian for "Stranglehold") play what can loosely defined as black metal, but they have as much in common with AC/DC, Kylesa, Tight Bros From Way Back When, and Turbonegro as they do with Darkthrone or Satyricon. The new album is astounding but the demos possess a lo-fi hiss that adds immeasurable charm and character to these distinctive, cowbell-heavy songs. The majority of this is sung in Norwegian but the meaning and message behind these songs remains universal:
Mjød