But yeah, it's a post about Australian goregrind. I don't think I've done that yet.
I know everyone has a story, and they are all united in how uninteresting they are to outsiders, but in short, XTREEM MUSICK was my gateway into the world of not only being an annoying music anthropology guy, but also wielding a riot shield against sexual congress with my peers. For some reason, XL Last Days Of Humanity shirts and greasy, waist length hair don't really aid you in leveling the schoolyard with a nuke of pheromonal supremacy. At this point in my life I'm mostly a pop punk kid (chuck tayz amirite lol), but sometimes, when I go extra-chromosome werewolf, I get nostalgic for the awkward summers of high school where I'd sit and wait by the mailbox for my stack of deplorably illustrated CDs to arrive. There is literally nothing quite like the embarrassment and confusion that pummels your psyche into simple syrup like your mom stumbling upon your stack of Meat Shits and Cock & Ball Torture CDs. That moment was easily the shamefuck moment to fill in for most people's adolescent "getting caught spanking to Naruto X Naruto clones fanfic on the family Dell at midnight" regret stories, and I think it's at least 70% responsible for the chronic distant, "deep pain stare" I carry today.
Anywheyprotein, for my sweet money, the best grind scenes the world ever blessed us with weren't in the UK or US, but 2000's era Australia and the Czech Republic. While the latter boasts a cray number of super innovative, boundary pushing bands (fucking srsly, my mind still boggles over that shit), Australia seems content with just getting high and writing songs with titles like "Fuck... I Just Copped A Beer Glass To The Head!!", thus allowing everyone to win.
Here's the general M.O. of Oz grind bands I've discovered via observation & talking to lots of band members on the Teufel's Tomb forum back in the mid-2000's:
1.) write a bunch of really catchy, addictive songs that aren't typically pushing the envelope but just crazy solid and lots of fun to jig to
2.) don't take your self seriously. like, at all
3.) wait so long to record anything new that your fanbase gets passed onto their children (unless you're TDEBN)
4.) get fucked over by your label/producer/primary source of income that floats the Anti-Lucrative Boat Of Creating Goregrind
Now that that's established, let's take a look at some of the bigger bands out there. But not Blood Duster.
Blood Duster sucks.
The Day Everything Became Nothing
Having grown up in the interbutt helmed explosion of information technologies, I owe many tons of shit to a handful of e-personae. In fact, if it weren't for certain cults of personality, I probably wouldn't know shit from other, different shit, musically speaking. Seeing as I can trace many of my fixations to precise individuals, I think I'll publicize this to forever halt the temptation to act as a self-conscious blogbaby/bastion of wisdom & experience-type:
Andy Radin's history lesson on scholarly approval and unveiling of emo's glory days gave me an un-embarrassing (relatively) emotional outlet for my teenage angst, Mitch Clem introduced me to pop-punk as something much richer than a mainstream 2000's farce, and Dave Lang's weekly jives on the avant-garde made the entire underground seem less paralyzingly vast and impenetrable. Prior to any of this, though, was my stumbling upon Teufel's Tomb - a currently defunct metal review site full of assholes joking about how stupid the music they loved was. It was here I gained not only a love for the most neanderthalic of genres (death metal, grindcore, goregrind, etc) but through their laxness, dodged the grotesque bullet of becoming an IMN (internet metal nerd), forever battling the plebs for taste supremacy.
TDEBN's debut, Le Mort, was thoroughly praised by two of the writers I trusted most, and being brand new to goregrind, everything about it intrigued me endlessly. What kind of goregrind album didn't feature some dismal rotten.com cover or a logo written in squiggly bullshit?
I grabbed up a copy pretty shortly after without even sampling it since I'm loose cannon who lives on the edge, and to this day it remains one of the absolute densest, grimiest albums I've ever heard. The production turns this already down-tuned crusher into a quivering, in-the-red, spine-kaleidoscopingly heavy mass of pit riffage to destroy bedrooms to, and the songwriting is top notch across the board. Consisting of members of Fuck...I'm Dead and Blood Duster, TDEBN sound pretty much exactly like neither band, and deliver a ridiculous goregrind anvil full of thick, chundering grooves, catchy off-time riffs, and an absurdly low pitch shifted growl in the Last Days Of Humanity vein.
While I completely love this album, none of the band's other material packs quite the same grisly punch as the debut, but if you need a source of bowel herniation, this is your band.
LONGEST HIATUS: Only 3 years between Brutal and their split with Cliteater. Where's another LP, though?
Captain Cleanoff
This didn't actually drop until years after I moved on from my strictly metallic/grind/gore phase, but holy dix was it worth the wait. Prior to this, the Cap'n had put out a single track since 2001's awesome self-titled mCD, so shuffering and shmiling (suffice) to say, I had long given up on the band by the time their first full length was released in 2008. Fortunately I was able to tear myself out of a strictly folk punk/noise rock phase to hear this, because for what it's worth, this is one of the absolute best pure grindcore releases since Terrorizer's World Downfall. Except srs. If there's one thing I've listened to way too fucking much of, it's grindcore/gore - from the classics through the newer schools and the most bedroom entrenched of bands - so I should at least be able to feign some sort of credibility here.
YEAH INTERNET PERSONALITY.
The production is a crusty, warm, mid-range that perfectly accents the razor-sharp, old-school riffage without burying their cadence, the vocals are a frantic mess of inhuman screeches and Lord Worm-esque gutturals, and yet somehow the whole package is catchy as [some airborne illness]. I'm always impressed by bands who can flourish and write excellent songs in a such a confining genre without pushing the stylistic envelope too much, and these guys certainly have that down pat. There's just that difficult-to-define "it" component here that makes this band not only stand out, but rank up with there with the best - past and present. I know this might sound hyperbolic as my ass is fine, but I dunno, I've had 5 years to change my mind, and so far still ranks up there with From Enslavement To Obliteration, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses, Reek Of Putrefaction, and Misery Index. YEAH I SAID IT.
LONGEST HIATUS: A whole 6 years between the self-titled mCD and Symphonies Of Slackness
Super Fun Happy Slide
Named after some forgettable detail from a "Treehouse Of Horror" Simpsons episode, and paired with the infamous x-ray blowjob pic and a logo that may as well have been in comic sans, Super Fun Happy Slide stepped out onto the scene off an elevator of class. The "band" kicked up around 2004 as a the solo project of current drummer Brad, let loose the Super Fun Happy Demo, an hilarious 12 minutes of goofy samples, catchy mid-high paced grinding fun, and hilarious songtitles such as "The Day Everything Became Something" and "Regurgitation Of Giblet Like Chunks Of Pathologically Perverse Gore". Pretty shortly after, college football star Brad recruited a few more members to release the Rehearsal Demo in 2005, and with a stylistic shift towards tighter, speedier early-Napalm Death grind, thus began the descent into inactivity.
Okay that's not totally true. I'm sure the band kept touring and writing. It's sort of hard to tell with all these bands, though, seeing as I'm in 'Murka and they're all the way down in the land down under. I wonder how much they collectively hate Crocodile Dundee.
Oh but yeah they wouldn't release anything else 'til 2012.
Anyway, being captivated early on by their silly humor and catchy high paced grinding AKTION led me to chat with Nik on the Teufel's Tomb forums, and after much shit-shooting and such, he asked me to do some art for them. I quickly obliged and did an admittedly-too-detailed piece illustrating the track "Placenta On The Dance Floor" (which you can see here if you promise not to look at anything else) for a shirt design in exchange for an advanced copy of their brand new CD. Boring story possibly less boring (and shorter), the site crashed pretty shortly after, taking the forum with it and all contact I had with the band, thus eliminating the contract.
The Undislodgeable Nugget Scenario didn't see the light of day for years after that, but as far as I'm concerned, was worth the wait. If you like raw, blasting, straight-forward grindcore with tons of catchy riffs, the band has a new album slated for release later this year, too.
So expect it in 2016, I guess.
LONGEST HIATUS: A punishing 7 year gap between Rehearsal Demo and The Undislodgeable Nugget Scenario. I'm pretty sure the latter was recorded 3 years earlier than it was released, too.
Fuck...I'm Dead
BREAKING NEWS: Did you know that Fuck...I'm Dead changed their name along with their logo way back in 2009? They must've said FUCK OFF, ELLIPSES - AND TAKE YOUR IMPLIED PAUSE ELSEWHERE and are apparently now just Fuck I'm Dead. I find myself in compliance with this decision because I don't think I've ever said their name aloud with the brief pause included, which was doing a great disservice to their artistic vision. I bring this up because going it's somehow never struck me in all these years how fucking stupid all of these bands' names are. Maybe there's an unspoken contest in Australia to one-up the clownliness of their contemporaries?
That aside, Fuck...I'm Dead (since I've not yet heard their new, grammatically truncated material and am, thus, unable to comment) is surprisingly, a LOT less dopey and mindless than their name might entail (let alone the song titles). Their debut full length, the 5-minutes-in-Photoshop 1.0-illustrated Bring On The Dead, is a blazing fast 21-track assault of some of the tightest, most, uh, musical grind you're likely to stumble upon. "Twist Of Death" kicks things off with one of the best samples ever sampled (which has remained a joke in my friend group for years) before "caving in your head for a raging 23 minutes with an unholy blend of melody, grind, groove, and aggression" as some metal review guy might say. It's pretty incredible how memorable these tracks are for their speed and brevity, but I suppose this sort of genre doesn't often inspire the most technically skillful of musicians to participate.
I'm going to assume this album's about as difficult to come by as, well, almost everything else I listed here, but c'mon, who actually BUYS MUSIC anymore? Either way, seat yourself down for a listen. It's honestly one of the best, most original grind albums I can think of.
LONGEST HIATUS: 9 ridiculous years between the split with Engorged and last year's Another Gory Mess. The fuck, u guys.
Intense Hammer Rage
Ok so this band is admittedly a hard sell. While they fall in line with standard goregrind principles like "record everything so it sounds like a bunch of gunky diesel engines struggling to turn over" and "be super gross and offensive because you probably like horror movies", Intense Hammer Rage actually take it a step further than this. In fact, so much so that their Avagoyamugs CD from 2001 was confiscated by Australian authorities on it's way to Razorback Records in Kentucky, their houses were raided, and the band was collectively fined thousands of aussiebucks. This is probably because the production makes the guitar sound like a bunch of mud shivering rhythmically. Also the lyrics on here hit clownshoes levels of disturbing. See, while goregrind typically tackles all sorts of important issues like eating people, stringing together random multisyllabic words from pathology journals, accounts of atrocious buttpain-fueled misogyny, and corking dead people, pedophilia has always been sort of No Man's Land.
Some of my best friends are pedophilesExcerpts like this (as well as the samples from South Park and Dogma) pretty clearly point to these guys as tongue-in-cheek motherfuckers, but there's not really a lot of leeway to be granted when you're writing songs about this sort of thing. Particularly in the eyes of the Australian authorities, I guess.
I like to watch them, I like their style
Some day I might be a pedophile
I practice, I perform on drunk midgets
Hone my skill with donger and with digits
Nearly ready for someones kid
I'll hunt one down, do you know where yours is?
Beyond being the least SFW band in the world, IHR are an incredibly bizarre, original goregrind/brutal death metal unit with easily the sickest three-pronged vocal attack I've ever heard (srs). Having once been a vocalist for a death/grind band, I have literally no clue they're producing half of these sounds, but apparently it's without the aid of a pitch shifter. On top of that, the fills are crazy and the riffing is surprisingly technical without being a lot of feverish foreskin tugging. If you're interested, their first full length, Devogrindporngorecoreaphile, is my favorite release of theirs, and probz the only release of the band you'll ever find, seeing as it was re-released on a split with Drogheda a few years back.
LONGEST HIATUS: Finally, the craziest gap of all - it's been TWELVE FUCKING YEARS since Avagoyamugs came out, and these guys aren't even split-up! They just updated their BigCartel, as a matter of FAQ.
UPDATE: Apparently all of their albums have been re-released and you can pick them up on their BigCartel account. The new cover to Avagoyamugs is a nice touch.
Okay, so there's some crop-cream right there. If you take to this like an entitled rainbow kid to a bumfeed, I was going to point you to No Escape Records, but then I remembered that they've been corpsey for the past 5 years. Prior to that, though, they were the equivalent of the Czech Republic's hit factory, Bizarre Leprous Productions - a primarily regional heap of the best bands in the entire scene. In the wake, though, it seems that Blastasfuk's picking up the rad Oz-core slack, so get on that.
Here's a list of additional sweeties to pick up, though, if you need some help sifting out the diamonds: Vaginal Carnage, Roskopp, Agents Of Abhorrence, Doubled Over, Garbage Guts, Undinism, The Kill, & Die Pigeon Die. I've never been too big on Warsore or Blood Duster, personally, but they're also pretty huge names in the scene, too.
Did I miss any new, awesome bands? I've been sorta out of the loop for a few years, so if anyone wants to throw some recommendations at me, I'd really appreciate it.
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