This album is a rabid revenge fantasy, a drug-addled escaped mental patient's one man war with the world. Full of spite and poison, Cage spits and slobbers his way through track after track of violent daydreams, often naming names. That said, it's also complex, multi-layered, diverse, and cathartic in a way, like draining venom from a snake bite.
Click on that cover above to see the large version. Go ahead, do it, I'll wait.
Ecco una strana da fuori campo a sinistra per voi in questo giorno d'estate. E 'la colonna sonora del film Kriminal nocciola italiana, la storia di un ladro maestro capperi e la sua audacia. E 'swinging jazz degli anni Sessanta, non a tutti onimous minaccioso o in qualsiasi modo, ma appena sufficiente a squittire bizzarro passato i giudici qui alla Palude.
Widely brushed off as a novelty act, late 80's preteen punk band Old Skull occupies a unique niche in music history, like some sort of Reaganomics-era Jackson 5. It's easy to dismiss this echoey noise as the work of malleable children under the thumb of a controlling parental figure, or as the adolescent and aimless squealings of little kids with unformed musical abilities and little self-awareness. I, on the other hand, am of the opinion that it holds up purely on its own merits, legitimately and without irony or qualification. It's ugly, strange, and a bit daffy at times, but so were the 80s and everything that's followed. A couple of years of living next door to a certain member of Old Skull in the oos gave me a particularly affectionate perspective on the band, I feel, but so has pouring through reams and piles of bizarre music in the course of shaping the Swamp. Listening to this next to the vast legions of twisted bedroom black metal out in the cosmos, all the subnormal doom bands and weird inept punk, I can't help but smile. Black metal bands rarely sing about pizza these days.
Tasty Polish black metal monikered after the yellow toad demon crucial to the Necronomicon's spell for summoning Yog-Sothoth. Specifics aside, this is some truly mysterious muffled noise, as if the band was being suffocated by a pillow, or playing from beyond some dimensional threshold. Primitively and hatefully played, surely unintelligible to even native Poles, and devoid of hope and air.
An all-time classic of the Lovecraftian sub-genre, this album burbles up from the bottom of the ocean and releases noxious green gases into the atmosphere. Here, doom metal is stretched to the furthest depths, beyond song structure, riffage, audible and distinguishable vocalization, and, for the most part, seemingly beyond the actual playing of notes. Glacially paced and teetering on the brink of unlistenable slurping, this is absolutely a must-have for any resident of the Swamp.
Taking a break from the mind-numbing of chore of restoring my music library one album at a time - long periods of boredom punctuated by fits of rage - here's some b-level German thrash in the classic mode. Not too much to rhapsodize about here, and not much time, so take it or leave it. Best song:
Well, my precious, we've not achieved full capabilities just yet in Swamptown, but here's a morsel to tide you over whilst we get back on track: suppressed bootleg The Dragon, by Vangelis Papathanassiou. Who bootlegs Vangelis, you ask? Seemingly this weird album was released by the other musicians present, but quickly squashed by the chubby composer as he deemed it too loose and sloppy to be worthy of joining his cannon. Hindsight suggests that this is a matter of taste, as it sounds mighty righteous to these ears at the moment, but I certainly invite you to judge for yourself, as always. How can you not be charmed by that album cover?
Well, my seedlings, the Swamp motherbox seems to have moved beyond these realms, taking a large portion of her music with her. Bear with me in my attempts to cross that threshold and bring her back. I will keep the updates coming when possible and hope to fully return to this plane of existence by Monday. In the mean time, let me put out some tentacles in search of enlightenment - these tomes so far evade my grasp:
Lovecraft - self-titled LP (Crafty Music 1995)
Cthulhus Scorn - Demo 2000
Shoggoth (Mexico) - Evoking The Ancient
The Norman Whitfield era of the Temptations is generally regarded of as the dawn of psychedelic soul music, fueled equally by LSD, Cold War paranoia, the Civil Rights movement, and the young psych rock scene. The Temptations, however, were still under pressure to be hit-makers, and Whitfield could only push the envelope so far while satisfying Motown's commercial standard. Not so with his other project, The Undisputed Truth. Hand-selected by Whitfield from the label's vast legions of semi-anonymous background singers and utilizing the same back-up musicians on the more famous Temps albums, and freed from pressure to make hits, the collaboration reached out farther into space than any had journeyed before. This third album was the first to really embrace the wild energy of the burgeoning psych scene and run with it. The first song, the aptly named "Earthquake Shake," is a monster bass riff, and thunderous drum line, and a chorus of bellowing, whooping aliens. The second is a funktified cover of Neil Young's "Down By the River," all eleven minutes of it. The third song is about UFOs. This album, too, was the debut of what became the group's signature look: Huge silver afro wigs and silver face paint.
Four way French black metal split featuring Malicious Secrets, Mütiilation, Antaeus, and the mighty Deathspell Omega. Behold the blasphemy and stifle laughter at the song title "Tears of a Melancholic Vampire."
For a brief period of time in the nineties there existed a style of hip-hop called horrorcore, which combined the most delightful aspects of cartoonishly violent gangsta rap with the synth-laden musical atmosphere and blood-lust of the darkest horror movies. This style, despite its promising renaissance period, was quickly dated and degenerated into self-parody and the horrid Juggalo sub-culture. Fortunately many of the best albums of the genre have aged well and remain bracing and disturbing. Ganksta N-I-P was a Houston contemporary of Geto Boys and penned their horror-themed hit "Chucky." This album, one of the earliest and most primitive examples of horrorcore, rattles like a burnt skeleton and samples liberally from notable horror scores. N-I-P's rhymes are truly bizarre and menacingly surreal: he explains his sheer insanity by threatening to exchange heads with a moose and marry a dead horse in the lead track "Horror Movie Rap." Careful listening reveals many evil non-sequiturs, more often than not involving members of the animal kingdom that surely exist nowhere near Houston. Evidence indicates Ganksta N-I-P was genuinely, legitimately insane.
Just a quickie post today, and one that was bound to turn up here sooner or later: The first album by the filth-encrusted kings of post-apocalyptic war death/grind. No time for flowery exposition, just download and march forth!
