Sweet Tea

Back at you here with this swampy, mosquito-flecked psych blues record from the mighty Buddy Guy. Eschewing the slick production and smooth professionalism that marks most of his career, Buddy strips his band down to a bare minimum and grinds his guitar in the dirt. Heavily influenced by the Hill Country blues of R.L. Burnside, T-Model Ford and Junior Kimbrough, this wild and entrancing album stands out in Buddy's discography like a mutant step-child locked in the attic, banging on the walls and shouting.
Done Got Old

Screaming Lord Sutch and Heavy Friends

Recorded surreptitiously by England's dandy prince of the macabre, Screaming Lord Sutch, and his higher profile "friends" such as Jimmy Page, John Bonham, Noel Redding, etc., this album caused a huge amount of contraversy and effectively ended Sutch's career when it was released. The biggest issue, aside from the sketchy legality, seemed to be sound quality, as the musicians were led to believe these were demo recordings; it's quite raw and red-lined throughout. In hindsight, though, this lends a lot of grit and character to the songs and helps it stand out from Sutch's usual slick novelty-rock sound. Of course the quality of musicianship also elevates it above such middling status as well, producing yet another universally panned album that sounds crucial and forward-thinking half a century later, albeit mostly unintentionally. Drenched in reverb with distorted vocals and torrents of buttery slide guitar, this could easily be any number of modern hipster garage outfits in cheap suits. Sutch himself is all over the place, coming on like Iggy Pop possessed by Screaming Jay Hawkins, and tarted up like Alice Cooper. Dumb, freaky, and sweaty.
One For You, Baby

Johnny Thunders & Patti Paladin - Copy Cats

This overheated, bluesy album of duets from former New York Doll Johnny Thunders and the singer of the punk band Snatch (yeah, I've never heard of them either) seems to fit the hazy, bug speckled atmosphere in here right now. We have covers of Screaming Jay Hawkins, The Seeds, Elvis, The Shagri-Las, and many more. While this was produced right in the thickest, darkest part of the eighties, they're nary a gated snare, fake hand-clap, or cheesy synth on this album - instead we have gritty horns, lush strings, and ambiance for miles. Thunders is in fine voice, tackling these oldies like the anti-Buster Poindexter, and keeping up with the lovely Ms. Paladin seems to be propelling him every step of the way. One foot in the boroughs, one foot in the swamp.
She wants to mambo.

Dynamite Masters Blues Quartet - The Essential Sounds From The Far East

Perhaps it's a bit lazy to post two Japanese psych-freak bands in a row, but suppress your internet-bred automatic scorn response and just listen to this fucking thing. Contemporaries with luminary ronin like Guitar Wolf and Thee Michelle Gun Elephant, DMBQ are as gnarly and crazy as either of those bands without sounding anything like them. Heavier than a subway tube full of sarin gas, and wilder than a sake-drunk Godzilla staggering home and farting fire, this album is a hybrid of a more abstract MC5/BellRays joint and a lucid mid-period Boredoms record. Pound pound, scream, pound pound, scream, freak out, wah wah, scream scream, pound. Just like that, the album whirls like a massive wheel, threatening to hop the rail and crash directly into your forehead. Brace yourself.
Mo-Ya Mo-Ya

The True Endless - In the Swamp

Another fine entry in God Is Myth's low-print run Lovecraft series, this time some black metal from the void of space from the mysterious The True Endless. Structured around Lovecraft's short story Polaris, a dreamlike tale of a mysterious city whose gilded domes conceal dark secrets, this short release is over almost before it began, lingering hauntingly in the mind even after the details have begun to bleed.
Slumber, watcher, till the spheres,
Six and twenty thousand years
Have revolv'd, and I return
To the spot where now I burn.

Memphis Swamp Jam

If you're anything like me, you're already bored of knuckleheaded debate about the state of heavy metal in the year of 2010, you're out of patience with hipsters flinging the h-word at other hipsters, you're alienated by narcissism, petty irrelevant snark, humorless niggling about sound quality, and sub-relevant sub-genre Asperger's syndrome. Here's my advice: who cares?

What you're lacking is perspective: all of those records are shit, and they'll probably play one you hate at your funeral. You've spent your whole life working towards this scholarly multi-syllabic mode of criticism, and yet every goddamn day you've gotta get up and shrug your tension-knotted shoulders and declare your correctness to the world, like you're not gonna be embarrassed by it next year.

It's not like I have answers to all your shitty little life problems, but it might behoove you to just sit down for a minute and not make everything into a list or an argument or a pretend offense. Listen to Booker White, Furry Lewis, Fred McDowell. Listen to songs of death, booze, trains, prison, love, and dancing. Just please, stop your fucking complaining.
Keep your jank trimmed and burning.

Skepticism - Stormcrowfleet

Busy, busy days here in the Swamp, lately, but I must set aside some time to care for my little Swamplings, oh yes. Skepticism's Stormcrowfleet is debatably the first "funeral doom" album ever. Doubling the minimalism and measure slowness of their forbears, from Black Sabbath to Candlemass, Skepticism added heavy organ, mallet-played marching drums, and mystical chanting, effectively creating their own sub-genre and pushing the outer fringes of heavy metal into strange, ominous territory. Resonating at once blasphemous and pious, timber-rattlingly loud and subtly beautiful, Stormcrowfleet is a must for fans of Thergothon, Moss, Catacombs, and the like, even though none of those bands sound quite like this one.
At the swamps
Mist is rising

Screamin' Jay Hawkins and The Fuzztones - Live EP

Screamin' Jay Hawkins, of course, is the mad godfather of horror rock, and the Fuzztones are hirsute garage revivalists now approaching their fourth decade of activity. This brief EP from 1984 captures four songs from a live performance replete with Hawkins' trademark weird gibberish and profanity and the band's prime, organ-heavy psychedelia. Not much else to say about this one except "Some father's son is gonna get a furburger."

Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires

Take a long, careful look at that cover: dub wizard Scientist and his monster-hunter crew tooling through the Swamp, blasting strange reggae music from his speakerboat to the horror and confusion of the array of classic Universal monsters that lurk there, doing who knows what. Present on this album are a morbid gallery of musical Frankenstein's monsters, thematically concerned primarily with vampires, mummies, and zombies, with occasional nods to other archetypes. Dub, like much music created on the fringes of cryptic subculture, is nigh-impossible to accurately describe, and similarly daunting to listen to for the uninitiated. Much of it is the aimless noodling of fried-minded headcases, but at its pinnacle it is transcendentally weird and can wreak permanent mental change upon the unsuspecting. If the stars are right, mayhaps this can happen to you.
Your Teeth In My Neck

Swamp Dogg - Rat On!

Here's the second album by perennial Swamp hero Swamp Dogg, whom I've expounded upon before at length here. The Dogg backs up somewhat from his post-apocalyptic version of soul to tackle more down-to-earth topics such as war and sex. The highlight of the album is the mighty cry for revolution, "God Bless America For What?" a heartbreaking reaction to the war in Vietnam and the Nixon regime. Most of the rest of the songs concern themselves with matters of the heart and other organs.
Do You Believe?

Lurking Fear - Songs in the Key of Lovecraft

Rudimentary Peni's Cacophony is widely regarded as the most important Lovecraftian punk album, but few seem aware of this forgotten 80's gem by Missouri punkers Lurking Fear, who claim to be inspired by not only H.P.L. but by Poe, Ambrose Bierce, and Alan Moore. This last manifests itself in the the song "Swamp Thing," which morphs from a crazed hardcore stomper into a spacey death-rock groove with Moore's words recited over it, and then bizarrely shifts into the "Wild Thing"-styled theme from the 80's cartoon. Other tracks include "Born in Fear", "Werewolf" in the which the singer howls wildly, and "Innsmouth Bay." The sounds range from caveman pounding to moody, swirly goth, played at the far fringes of competence and traditional notions of what constitutes a song.

There's something in the basement...

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.