Scumdogs

RIP Flattus Maximus

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

Arkham Witch - On Crom's Mountain

At last, a new release from Arkham Witch!  I'm breaking my own no-new-releases rule once again here due to my excitement over this album.  Straddling the line between the old-school Lovecraftian doom of Simon Iff's other project Lamp of Thoth and the NWOBHM-informed approach of like-minded bands such as Christian Mistress, On Crom's Mountain isn't deep or particularly dark heavy metal.   Instead, it's a fairly upbeat, joyous drunken celebration of crusty rock n' roll, ragged and righteous.  Of course, there's the requisite Lovecraft/Howard lyrical leanings, along with some witch and viking-related material, and some more cryptic sentiments.  It's still gestating in my ears, as I've only listened to it a scant handful of times, but even now I must go crack another beer and loosen up the old neck muscles - It's tough to headbang and type at the same time.

Through Arkham madness, and lunacy

In gibbous frenzy - we are free!

Bruce Dickinson - Chemical Wedding

Here's an esoteric gem from Bruce Dickinson's uneven solo career, a mixture of prophetic and allegorical material based on the writing and painting of William Blake, and Rosicrurianism's secret rites and alchemical preoccupation.  On top of being a world class fencer, aviator, novelist, and heavy metal singer, Mr. Dickinson is a serious student of the occult, and he explains the album in depth here far better than I could.  Many of the lyrics are cryptic and abstract, though, allowing one to come to one's own understanding and relationship with the album.  Musically, it's pretty straightforward and solid Maidenism (Adrian Smith is the primary guitar player) aside from a few excellent cameos from Swamp veteran Arthur Brown and the occasional modern screamy vocal accent.  The patient disciple will discover multiple layers of meaning and depth, and the casual headbanger will find a bunch of kick-ass heavy metal.  

This is the river of space 

This is the river of time

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?

Jag Panzer - Tyrants

This classic first EP from Jag Panzer contains a Nam-as-apocalypse anthem, two songs about the crushing power of heavy metal, a song about Conan battling iron statues come to hideous life, and another sword-and-sorcery romp about besieging a citadel.  The epic "When Metal Melts the Ice" is, without a doubt, one of the Most Metal Songs of All Time.  Musically, Jag Panzer would evolve into slick power metal, but this first release is raw, thrashy, and wildly over-the-top no-modifier metal from a time before sub-genres walked the earth.

I'm a vicious tiger Roaming across the land

Briton Rites - For Mircala

 

Greetings, dearies!  I have once again returned to the Swamp, and am back among you.  Today I have for you one of the great unheard doom albums of the last year, the debut album from Georgia's hirsute Briton Rites. Effortlessly evoking the dark history of doom metal without sounding artificially retro or atavistic, For Mircala is a loose concept album centered around vampirism and Lovecraftian dimensional bleedthrough.  I have a particular weakness for metal bands with literate and diverse sources, and these chaps certainly deliver on that front: the title cut is based on a pre-Dracula vampire novel; "The Right Hand of Doom" is grounded in a Robert E. Howard short story starring his demon-hunting Puritan, Solomon Kane; several other are grounded in Hammer Horror flicks and pulpy supernatural melodrama.  Musically, it owes a heavy debt to the doomier side of NWOBHM, like Witchfinder General of Pagan Altar, with killer vocals from Phil Swanson (of such Swamp favorites as Hour of 13, Seamount, and Atlantean Kodex) and guitars by Howie Bentley of legendary Georgia metal band Cauldron Born.  More importantly, every song is memorable, catchy, and tough - no pretty stuff here, just doom and blood and haze.

The doom evoked by the words he spoke, as the hand began to crawl

Year of the Goat - Lucem Ferre

There's a ton of this occult doom rock floating around these days, so much so that's it difficult to parse out the primo stuff out of legions of clones.  I have discovered this EP by Year of the Goat (from Sweden, of course), and it's quickly one of my most-spun over the last few months.  Fans of Pentagram, Graveyard, Witchcraft, The Devil's Blood, and Noctum will find much to enjoy here: tales of hedonism and regret, crushing fuzz riffs, flaxen hair blowing in the northern winds, and even a cover of Sam Gopal's "Dark Lord."  Hopefully they will release a full length before the darkness swallows them.

She pours cataclysm from her golden cup.

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

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

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

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

Pagan Altar - Lords of Hypocrisy

Skirting the doomier edges of the NWOBHM, Pagan Altar played a stoic, dead-serious brand of heavy metal drawing influence from the first Black Sabbath album's graveyard shuffle and Paranoid's war-pig politicism, while delving further into the realm of mystic lyricism. Right off the bat, the title track comes stomping out of Stonehenge decrying the evils of war and greed, immediately followed by the doomsaying "Satan's Henchmen," arguably another war parable. This relentless pace eases up a bit as the album progresses - the b-side is more expansive and subdued, but the closing number fulfills the promise of Armageddon. Terry Jones's instantly recognizable, haunted vocals are another huge draw here - full of fear and anger and sadness, they really elevate the album above the legions of bands playing in this style today. Alas, the man will probably never be spoken of in the same reverent tones as your Ozzys or your Dios (or Halfords, Dickinsons, etc.) but in my mind he really is in their league as a frontman.
Strangely, Pagan Altar never managed to release a proper album during their initial run as a band, but a late-nineties reunion managed to produce a stellar crop of albums, of which this is the second. The gods of doom may move slowly, but sometimes they reward the faithful.
Death will come to even the righteous
Only the good die young

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

RIP Würzel Burston

Well, this is a few days late, but I couldn't stop listening to this, my favorite Motörhead album, so I figured I might as well post it. Arguably the last really crucial record they released, and the peak of the dual-guitar era, 1916 is partially a meditation on WWI, complete with the touching and delicate title cut, and also a celebration of unkillable rock n' roll. Lots to like on this one - Ramones tribute "R.A.M.O.N.E.S.," trippy experiment "Nightmare Dreamtime," seize-the-day anthem "No Voices in the Sky," and so on. Further proof that Motörhead was much more than a one-trick pony.
RIP

Armored Saint - Delirious Nomad

Notorious these days mostly for being the band John Bush fronted before 90's-era Anthrax, Armored Saint kicked out some solid traditional metal back in the day, appropriating many of thrash's fixations on nuclear war and the apocalypse and encasing them in homemade Road Warrior leather and NWOBHM-influenced mid-tempo chugs. This album isn't perfect - far from it - but it does contain meaty end-times jams like "Aftermath" and "Conqueror." While the lyrics generally range from abstract to outright stupid, Bush's instantly recognizable hoarse bellow really sells it, even when the guitars are a bit underwhelming. What is it with 80's bands having to stick one stupid joke song at the end of every album, though? The unfortunate icky come-on "Released" drags the tail end of the record down into no-makeup Kiss territory, so be warned.
While the faces stare
At the hideous glare

Devil - Magister Mundi Xum

It's a bit difficult to properly convey the sense of foreboding and gloom on this doom demo from last year while this kitten writhes around on my lap and sheds upon my keyboard, but let's say it's a fair shot between Ghost's Blue Öyster Cult/Mercyful Fate hybrid and the swaggering bell-bottom blues-metal of your Pentagrams and your Witchcrafts. There's an album from this year you'll want to look into if this whets your appetite, but be sure to spit out all the cat hair first.
I Made A Pact

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

Live From the Depths of Hell

Happy Birthday King Diamond