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

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

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

Bob Ohiri & His Uhuru Sounds - Uhuru Aiye

Well, I need another breather from all the metal, so lets venture deep into Nigeria and visit with Bob Ohiri and his band. Primarily famous for playing guitar for the legendary Kind Sunny Adé, pioneer of the Jùjú genre, Ohiri breaks loose here and plays a forward-thinking brand of afrobeat colored with bop jazz and gritty funk. I don't have much of a clue as to what's gong on lyrically, as most of the songs are in Yoruba, but two of the English ones express a yearning for freedom and a cry for solidarity. Beyond that, the music is heavily percussive - there must be a dozen drummers and percussionists - and shot through with horn lines, quivering wah-wah, and layered background chants, producing a danceable but vaguely unsettling cacophony. Heady, sweaty stuff for a hot summer night.
Nigeria London Na Lagos

Small Talk

Who'll pay reparations on my soul?

Sad Wings of Destiny

Oy, what a shitty day in the Swamp! I don't have the heart to re-type the lengthy complaint session I just spewed out and accidentally deleted, and nobody needs to hear it anyway. What we need to listen to instead is this second album by heavy metal outfit Judas Priest, whom you may have heard of. An early pinnacle in a long up-and-down career, it remains a personal favorite and a surefire cure for the crushing weight of the square world. Let's all sit together and let Mr. Halford and company wrap their sad wings about us, nuzzling up to their sweaty leather breast.
Victim of de Mayo

Poly Styrene RIP

What a year already...RIP

The Last Emperor - Music, Magic, Myth

I suppose I should be impervious to the close-mindedness and xenophobia in the metal community after two decades, but it still strikes a nerve whenever I hear someone bitching about "that rap crap" - not only is it stupid to dismiss a form of music whose underground is as diverse and thriving as heavy metal's, but it often smacks of barely-suppressed racism as well. Seriously, judging an entire genre by what you hear on the radio is just as reductive as saying all heavy metal sounds like and is a valid as the faddish deathcore clones and seemingly unkillable nu-metal knuckledraggers that represent heavy metal to the straight world.
Enough sermonizing: let's get down to it. Long-time Philly underground champ Last Emperor has made a niche for himself weaving dense, allegorical rhymes on a wide variety of subjects, from cryptozoology to comic books, from metaphorical rap tyranny to literal anti-fascism, from wizards to womens. This album is thick with jokes and references, serious-minded at its core but wrapped in layers of strangeness. Do yourself a favor and stretch those brain cells out a bit - too much death metal makes your mind mushy.
Hold On

Oi Polloi - T.H.C.

Please enjoy this 7 inch record from Scottish punk hippies Oi Polloi responsibly. Aside from the essential title track we have songs celebrating anonymous sex, satirizing burnt British soldier Simon Weston, and one in German about mustard gas or something.
Meine augen!

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

Radio Birdman - Radios Appear

A classic first LP by legendary Sydney punkers Radio Birdman, Radios Appear is a whirlwind ride of surf guitars, psychedelic angst, and adventurous weirdness. Along with the Saints, Radio Birdman rescued the Austrailian music world from mediocrity and birthed a nationwide scene in a few short years. They were all dark sunglasses, swagger and sweat, twang and tweak. And there's a Roky Erickson cover!
Aloha Douchebags!

Crime - Piss On Your Turntable

From the mean streets of San Francisco, Crime only managed to put out three seven inch records during their chaotic late 70's career, but after they imploded, a flood of bootlegs hit the market as testimony to their memorable, sexy/sketchy sound and snarling swagger. On this particular one we have those records, the unreleased LP "San Francisco's Doomed," and a cassette demo. Crime were seedy drug-addled leatherboys in cop drag, with beady eyes hidden behind mirrored shades and more forward inertia than competence. Notoriously, they once played a show at San Quentin wearing the same uniforms as the guards, to a less-than-delighted reaction from the inmates. More primitive hateful noise for all you ugly trolls.
Piss On Your Dog

The Rip Offs - Got A Record

Legendary San Francisco lowlifes The Rip Offs were a swilly antidote to much of the humourless no-fun hardcore of the nineties, staking out a tiny patch of land for themselves and like-minded bands amid a sea of screamo and buttflap-types. A beer-sodden bleary-eyed bender of a record, containing fourteen songs in a little over twenty minutes, this seems designed to not only alienate the more sensitive hardcore crowd but also the poofy-shirted 60's throwbacks dominating the garage rock scene. Seemingly recorded with two tin cans and some string, this is the perfect soundtrack for one of those end-of-summer crime sprees that inevitably end way too soon.
Rip Your Heart Out

Razor - Open Hostility

The sound of a police state gone mad. Canadian thrash act distills its chosen form of expression down to its blackened skeleton. Tear gas, flash grenades, tasers, chainsaws, tanks, burning dumpsters, and the fine art of police brutality.
Here's what I think about your peaceful protest.

Swamp Dogg - Total Destruction to Your Mind

Good evening, precious ones, and pardon my brief absence from the Swamp - I was called into the loathesome fringe of civilization on some unfinished business. Fear not, though, for I return with gifts! I present to you the first and most startling album by Post-Apocalyptic Libertarian Sci-Fi Soul Brother Swamp Dogg, the aptly titled Total Destruciton to Your Mind. The wild-eyed futuristic alter-ego of soul producer Jerry Williams, Swamp Dogg stood out from the hordes of 70's musical hustlers and players in a number of ways: first, in his disdain for consumerism, expressed here in the track "Synthetic World," a dystopian shopping fantasy on par with X-Ray Spex or the Clash's "Lost in the Supermarket." Secondly, in his vocal and active opposition to both the Vietnam war and the domestic war on drugs, which earned him a high-ranking spot on Nixon's enemies list. Thirdly, his strict self-reliant ethic - he lives and publishes his own albums to this day, in addition to producing hundreds of albums for other artists (most of which were primarily comprised of songs he wrote). Fourthly, his eerie visions of the coming apocalypse, which pepper his albums up until the end of the seventies, but most succinctly and jaw-droppingly on this album's centerpiece, "The World Beyond." Swamp Dogg continues to fight the war on greed, hypocrisy, and unfunkiness. Join him.
It's just a little time left.

Tem Eyos Ki - 2001 tour cd

A rare gem in a sea of slime, the lamented Tem Eyos Ki, Little Rock's reigning champions of twin-guitar sorcery, produced this forgotten and seemingly disposable cdr to accompany their tour of the United States in 2001. At one time this was playing constantly out of cracked windows and crackly boom boxes up and down the streets of our little hamlet, but, as is the nature of such materials, all copies were seemingly lost or worn down to translucency within a year. Imagine a female-fronted Iron Maiden writing songs for 8-bit video games and broadcasting out of a low-hanging UFO, hovering above the Tigris and Euphrates - this was Tem Eyos Ki, and they are missed.
Ogoni

Memento Mori - Discography

Another seemingly forgotten work of great beauty and darkness returned to light only yesterday (or was it the day before?), after considerable time in limbo, poking its serpentine head out from behind of mound of cobwebbed bones in a dank corridor long hidden from daylight. Memento Mori, appropriately named and ephemerally renowned, seem to have vanished into the netherworld of digital refuse: a relic of the time of the compact disc but predating the advent of obscuritan internet scribes, whiling away the weeks in darkened rooms thrown into sharp relief by the malignant glow of the monitor. Lo, give thanks that my monk-like scholasticism has brought forth tangible results, and then repent your ignorance as I wield this black-crusted lode of precious metal ore to bludgeon your feeble brain to a pulp. Winding sheets of thickly-woven guitar, wailing anguished vocals, and the rumble of elephantine stampedes shall echo in your numbed ears as you awaken into a new, hideous understanding.

Repent, but it is futile.

Fela Kuti - Zombie

Perhaps the seminal work of Fela Kuti, Nigeria's cross between James Brown, Malcolm X, and Muhammad Ali, Zombie works on several simultaneous levels: as a hypnotic, trance-inducing meditation; a sharp-tongued but subtle decrying of his country's government and military, a horror story of voodoo re-animation, and a blistering funk record. Four songs, none of them shorter than twelve minutes, flowing together in a liquid bath of horn stabs and poly-rhythms. It functions much like the doom metal albums enshrined herein: as a long-form dark poem which rises and falls but in which the tide never goes all the way out, lapping at the shores of your subconscious. This album, upon release, sparked a series of riots in Lagos in which Kuti's compound was invaded and his elderly mother was defenestrated. In protest, he dragged her coffin to the courthouse and, bizarrely, on the first anniversary of the attack he married 27 women in her remembrance.
Link removed