My retarded metal scrapbook, part 2

Here we have further proof of my self-important delusions of grandeur, circa 1992. Archived for your pleasure, numerous receipts of my musical purchases around that time, which I thoroughly believed would be displayed int he Smithsonian at one point.

Sacred Rich "Question", Rightouts Pigs "Stress Related", Brujeria 7", Misifts "Evilive", Death Kennedys "Give me Convenience"

Believer "Extraction", Broken Bones and Tankard cassettes, Slayer "Decade of Aggression", DRI "Crossover", Wehrmacht LP and Metallica "One" 45-single, Slayer cassette, and DOA cassette, Sacred Reich "Surf Nicaragua"

Guest post: Where's the love for awesome hardcore bands that turned into shitty metal bands?

This is the first of what we hope will be many guest columns from MI readers, in this case from frequent commenter and MI Twitter follower Snoopz. Naturally it isn't as good as something we would write ourselves, but you can't have everything, can you? If you're interested in writing something, please send it to our email or send a direct message on Twitter- the more the merrier!

This is my shot at a guest column for Metal Inquisition and it’s gonna be about hardcore bands that “went metal” in the 80’s and early 90’s, and, well, how that was totally fuckin awesome! Now right now, people who were hardcore fans in the 80’s, their heads are exploding, because what I just said is the equivalent of a teenager today telling me, a 30 year old, that it must have been awesome to be around in the 90’s to see the emergence of Slipknot and Sevendust. I’d say, “no, I went to Tattoo the Earth Tour and it sucked” and we would just not see eye to eye. Well I don’t connect well with older hardcore fans, record collectors, and so forth. I see them as the No Fun Club. Like, if my favorite Cro-Mags album is the wrong one, forget it, I’m not even worth talking to. No accounting for personal taste with these hardcore puritans, there are good albums and bad albums and, a consensus has been reached on the matter, and I should shut up.

School of Violence, Junkyard, and Broken Bones?! It's like a who's-who of forgettable crap all in one image!

The records I’m going to mention today, by Warzone, Token Entry, and DYS, are universally hated despite musical innovation and adventurous lyrics. What the fuck? I’ll get into this right now. I’m pretty positive most Metal Inquisition readers have a general awareness of hardcore music, but I should clarify that records I’m talking about don’t sound like the metalcore bands that were all spawned by At The Gates’ Slaughter of the Soul. In fact death metal is not really a factor. Think crossover, cheese metal, funk metal, thrash.


Here is a photo of my room around 2000. I was heavily involved in some hardcore archeology at the time, digging up albums from ten years earlier. Note all the tapes. Guess what? They were cheaper than Cds. And what tapes was I finding the most in used bins? The “sellout” metal albums by punk and hardcore bands that nobody wanted. Now you are getting an idea about why I know so much about this shit.

Warzone - Self-titled
Warzone was a NYHC band, had a killer 7 inch and two great, well-produced full lengths, and then the 1989 S/T album dropped, ruining everything in a lot of people’s eyes. When I was first listening to Warzone in the mid-90’s (they were reunited and playing often) I did not even know that the album existed. I found it hard to believe, when told by friends, that some “awful” Warzone record was out there with bullet holes on the cover. I searched for years. Nothing. Finally in the early 00’s I met a friend who had received the record as a birthday present. A gag gift of course. Amazingly his copy was a promo sent to a radio station and contained a press release for Caroline Records that was, I admit, rather funny, describing their logo as “the iron cross of unity.” My heart sank when I saw that the program director of the station had written on the release, in pen, “despite their best intentions, this is a lame band.”

Almost as awesome as the old Lion's Den picture where they're on the train tracks

The record rocks, good luck finding it on mediafire. Sure it has a thin sound, the guitars sound like a series of samples for a RUN DMC record all strung together, but this whole record moves at a mid-tempo groove that will fuck you up.


Token Entry - "The Weight of the World"
On to Token Entry, a melodic straight edge band from the late 80’s who dropped Weight of the World in 1990, a kind of hard rock funk metal record that is near and dear to my heart. Here are the words of AMG “The vocalist looks ready for the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the guitarist is black, the bass player was kidnapped from a hairy metal band, and the drummer looks like seventy percent of the male actors in Los Angeles.” Too much for most hardcore fans I’m sure. A photo of a band not looking right on the back of the record is enough for most fans to dismiss the album as “sellout” before putting it on the turntable. It’s like, if the record’s cover is in full color, it’s a deal-breaker. Oh well, their loss, this release is real fun and was recently re-issued.

DYS - Self-titled
Last and the best. DYS, self-titled LP. Fuck man, it kills me to see people on Amazon.com saying the discography CD is good only if you program your CD player to play the tracks from Brotherhood alone. 1984, this record is not influenced by thrash, it’s really just longer hardcore songs, with some higher-pitched vocal. In the words of the guitar player, "the most technically proficient and cleanest sounding record in the history of Hardcore." This shit is all muscle, so look out. Lyrics?

A demon trapped within all men
Has won the battle here
And those who set the demon free
Now have cause to fear
Gone the days of loneliness
Trapped within his brain
He steps forth into darkness
And remembers all the pain

Damn, you should listen to that stuff when working out.

Conclusion
Again, I’ll tell you all, I wasn’t there when all these records dropped, but I’ve been listening to this kind of shit for years and have got pretty much 100% negative feedback from people learning about my musical tastes. I dig Mucky Pup, and M.O.D., two bands recently dismissed here at Metal Inquisition. I don’t know why I got to go against the grain. A few years ago I saw a review in the thrash zine HeartattaCK lamenting that the cover of a new 7” featured cover art in the style of the Suicidal Tendencies Join the Army record cover. “I hope that this style of art does not come back,” said the reviewer. I wondered, “what the fuck kind of crappy album covers does this person like? Blurry photos with typewriter font lower-case text?” That is the antithesis of cool. Crossover rules.

Some bands are so bad they're horrible

Needless to say, things that are so bad they're good are a staple of the Metal Inquisition playbook. That said, sometimes it can be too much of an, uh, bad thing. That's when something is so bad it's horrible:

An ordinarily awful work can be So Bad Its Good, becoming popular and genuinely liked because of its unintentional comedy value. Others are far worse. These don't attract proper fandoms and aren't enjoyed, as such, but draw some attention out of a perverse sense of fascination. Prolonged exposure can cause wooziness and weakening of the grasp on reality.

Here are some our favorite examples of metal that's so bad it's just bad...



Gang Green
If you were a teenager who liked metal in the late 80s or early 90s, it is very likely you spent a lot of time digging through the bargain bin at your local music retailer, hoping to find some $2 tape that had somehow been undiscovered by the masses and, like junk bonds in the late 70s, was undervalued by the market. And if you're like me, you probably saw the same familiar faces again and again: RDP, Dead Brain Cells, and Gang Green's "Older... Budweiser." It is perhaps the epitome of "so bad it's horrible" in that it combines excruciatingly dull, derivative thrash metal riffs with the tiresome, juvenile rebelliousness of punk and tops it off with a generous helping of moronic 80s beer humor that wouldn't even make the cut for a Tankard b-side. Basically it's the crossover equivalent for those singing bass things. It's not charmingly offensive like, say The Mentors. You don't love to hate it like Mordred. It's not so retarded it's awesome, it's just fucking stupid, and when you press "play" on this tape, you will immediately be looking for "stop."

This song is seriously called "Solitary Solitude." Really!

Meliah Rage
Somebody mentioned Meliah Rage in the comments the other day, and what better occasion to bring them up than in a post about bands that are so bad they're horrible? Because Meliah Rage aren't just bad, they're fucking awful, and not in any kind of endearing, fun way like, say Nitro, Def Leppard or Accept. Listening to their records is about as much fun as taking a standardized test, except unlike the GMAT there's no reward for suffering through it. The riffs drag on for what seems like forever. They're never heavy enough to be heavy or melodic enough to melodic. Never fast, never slow, just plodding and dull to the point where you want to stab yourself in the brain with a machete. It's like that feeling of rage, disgust, and irritation you get when you're trying to explain to a woman how to use a piece of electronic equipment: "It's not on. Press the big green button that says 'POWER' on it. No, that's the remote for the DVD player. Here, I'll just do it for you." As many people will point out, Sully from Godsmack played drums in this band for a while. It shouldn't surprise you, though, that I love Godsmack, so I don't hold it against them. You probably will, though.

Annihilator
I wrote quite extensively about Annihilator in my February post entitled "I have disliked Annihilator for 18 years." There is no need for me to repeat it here, but if you are interested in things that I don't like (and who isn't??), give it a read! They still suck, so the post is as relevant today as it ever was.



Uncle Slam
You would think that I would love a band with "slam" in their name, but you couldn't be more wrong. Much like the recent US financial crisis showed that the financial system had run amok and needed oversight, Uncle Slam showed that the thrash metal scene was in dire need of quality control. This band was most generic of generic thrash; they ripped off the rip offs and copied the copycats. The only interesting thing I can say about this band is that there is absolutely nothing remarkable or unique about them relative to the incredible flood of awful thrash bands in the late 80s. Punny name? Check. Chopaholic riffs? Check. Shallow sociopolitical lyrics? Check. I could go on forever- there's even an Ed Repka oil painting on the cover like so, so many other 80s thrash records that are completely indistinguishable from each other. Like Mortal Sin, Beowulf, Agony Column, Hirax, Acrophet, Laaz Rockit and Holy Terror, there is absolutely no reason to ever listen to this band again for the rest of eternity, unless you love misery.



Origin
I will end this post with something a little more controversial. I loved the Origin's self-titled debut when it came out. It was totally fresh and unique, mostly because of the unpredictable, distinctive drumming. I still listen to it pretty often, and it still sounds great to me. So, you can imagine how upset I was when I heard their second album and they decided to change things up a bit and become a bland, reptitive, brutal death metal band that was nearly as dull as Hate Eternal, Nile and Vital Remains. OK, that was a little harsh- Vital Remains have the distinction of being the single least interesting death metal band to ever play a note of music. But you get the point. I think they could save themselves a lot of time by just setting a drum machine to play a blast beat at 250bpm for 35 minutes while someone plays random, tremolo-picked notes at the same time. Scratch that, just have a computer play the guitar part too. It would pretty much sound the same as their actual records but they wouldn't have to go to all the hassle of "writing songs." Because I still love their first album, though, I included a video above of one of their good songs- but don't be fooled! This band is now awful!!

5 Albums That Changed My (musical) Life

Computer-rendered depiction of the quiet moment when I decided to come up with this list.

My life in the world of metal has been a long one, at least it feels that way to me. Looking back on my years involved in metal, it's sometimes all a blur. I've attended lots of shows, concerts, and fests as an audience member. I booked bands, and helped my brother run his tape distro. Yes, there was a time when bands put out tapes. I saw Entombed at a strip club during their first US tour. I was part of the Wild Rags Records street team, and I was a pen pal of sorts with members from Hellwitch, Impetigo and other not-so-seminal bands. My brother and I did a radio show for many years, and played 7 minute Carcass songs so we could go to the bathroom which was roughly a mile away from the studio where we did the show from, and still get back in time to give out the call letters by the end of the hour. I played in bands, and got my double bass 36th notes to sound damn good and even. I've collected records, I've collected cassettes, and VHS tapes. I've driven long distances to see bands, and I've even waited to outside a tour bus to have an Obituary drumstick autographed. Okay, that last one still makes me cringe, but it was 1992 for god's sake! Anyway, because it's all a blur, I sometimes like to set some quiet time aside to think about it all. Just me, an Enya CD, a cup of tea, and nature. It's during these quiet moments (see image above) that I most effectively manage to reflect upon my life in the world of metal. Below is the product of my last quiet moment of reflection, a list of albums that changed my life. I've tried to be as truthful as possible in compiling this list, and as such the albums may not be as impressive or obscure as some I could have come up with. But this is the truth, here for all to read. These were albums that I encountered by chance at some point in my life. In one way or another, these recordings changed my view of music at that moment, and more often than not, sent me in a significantly different musical direction thereafter. School's in bitches. Let us begin.

1982

Kiss-Unmasked

I was a little kid when my brother and I received this album as a gift from our uncle. While many would argue that getting Unmasked as a gift is just as bad as getting smallpox infected blankets for your birthday, I have to tell you that I love this piece of garbage album to this day. In a way, I love almost anything that Kiss has done actually, best exemplified by Gene Hoglan's Balls and I singing "Hard Luck Woman" at a kareoke place just this weekend. But back to Unmasked. When I tell Kiss fans that this is my favorite Kiss album, they look at me exactly as you'd look at a retarded kid that just crapped his pants. A mix of disgust and sadness. What can I tell you, at such a young age, I had no idea that Kiss hadn't always been a disco-tinged pop disaster, but rather an awful talentless theater show. How was I to know? The album had enough songs with a harder edge to make it my favorite for many years, at least prior to my age jumping into the double digits. As a matter of fact, this was the only album that my brother and I listened to for most of our childhood. As a result of my youth, at one point I really did believe that Kiss may have actually been connected to satan, if only in a minor way. You see, my mom always told me to put my Kiss record away, (along with all my other toys) before going to bed. One day, I didn't listen to her and went to bed, leaving both the sleeve and the record sitting on the carpeted floor by my bed. In the middle of the night, I woke up to go to the bathroom, slipped on the record and hit the back of my head on the edge of my bed so hard that I nearly threw up from the pain. I remember getting a bump in the back of my head that was roughly the size of a hard boiled egg cut in half. After that day, I was always careful with the record, and kinda thought it really did have evil powers. As it turns out, the only evil power the record had, was making money for Gene and Paul for what basically amounted to third rate disco bass lines. I know, I was an idiot, but I was also like four. I loved the record, and while other kids in school were listening to silly kids music (perhaps one step up from "row, row, row your boat.."), I was listening to Kiss, and I felt like a bad-ass. This album basically set me up to continually keep looking for music that was harder, and more extreme than what the rest of the kids around me were listening to. Humble beginnings, I know, but in 1982, and this is all I had access to. About 8 years ago, my brother and I ended up at a taping of the David Letterman show. We sat right above Anton Figg, who was the session drummer for Unmasked. The whole time, I kept yelling at him to play "Torpedo Girl", which is my favorite song in the album. After the twentieth time, he kinda looked up, and shook his head. Yes, I had basically been told I was an asshole, but I had been told by the guy who laid down the groove on Torpedo Girl! So I was a happy man.




1988
Iron Maiden-Live After Death

Many years after Unmasked, my brother and I received dubbed copy of Live After Death from my sister's boyfriend. We were amazed by the whole tape. It was harder and faster than Kiss, and the cover (which we got a poster of) was way more evil! Eddie's shirt is all ripped, and the screw keeping his forehead shut was getting hit bit lighting! Holy shit! Sign me up! Soon after getting the tape, we watcged the home video version, and we were in love. I didn't speak any english then, but I could still be heard yelling out "scream for me long beach!" through the halls of my school. Can you believe that I still wonder why girls were repulsed by me? Maybe the bleached rat-tail, and the Brut Cologne didn't help, and I'm sure my wearing sweatpants constantly didn't make it any easier either. It's as though I was daring the oppostite sex to not throw up when looking at me. So, a couple of years after owning the tape, and playing it thousands of times, it became worn out. Another mishap with the TDK-60 dub of this album was that my sister's boyfriend had left the tabs in, so I mistakenly hit "record" twice while attempting to press "play" to listen to the tape. Because of this mishap, our beloved cassette had two blank spaces in crucial moments of songs. Actually, they weren't blank spaces, but spaces with ambient sound of my room back then, picked up by the small microphone in my Sony boombox. Having heard Maiden, the world of bands like Helloween, Metallica, Testament, and even Whiplash was open to my brother and me. I was like a fatty with an insasiable hunger for metal...and the pages of Metal Hammer magazine were my all-you-can-eat buffet. It was also around this time that we were introduced to some other very extreme bands, ones that bordered on grindcore, but they were small local bands that no one would know about...so I'll skip those. Moving on...






1989
Slayer-Reign In Blood, Venom-Black Metal

I count this one as one album, since it came to me as a single cassette. You see, one of our neighbors came to our house one day, asking if we'd buy one of his dubbed cassetes for five bucks or so. In retrospect, I think he wanted money to buy some wacky-tabbacky...but I'm not sure. He was older than my brother and me, and he was hella' metal. The tape he sold us was a 90 minute cassete with Reign In Blood on one side, and Black Metal on the other. While we liked Venom, it was Slayer that captured our imagination. Sadly, this was the first Slayer album I encountered. As I've stated before, South Of Heaven is my favorite...but life has a funny way of leading you down a path. Anyway, soon after hearing this tape, we got a dubbed copy of the Ultimate Revenge home video, and we were both hooked. Clearly, we didn't speak english then...otherwise we would have noticed just how insanely stupid Slayer comes off in that video. Luckily, we were clueless. Having heard Slayer, Metallica started to seem a little tame to us. We finally realized that Kiss was a disco band at one point. We were shocked. We still loved Maiden, but we knew that there were more extreme bands out there, and we had to find them. Destruction, Kreator, Cryptic Slaughter, Crumbsuckers and Bathory made sense to us after having owned this tape.



1989
Napalm Death-Peel Sessions

My friend's mom was going to England for work in 1989, and he asked my friend what he would like her to bring him back from England. Being a smart dude, he quickly called me and asked me for the names of the most extreme bands I could think of, so she could buy those tapes while in England. My brother and I compiled a list, but I don't think that Napalm Death was on it. We had heard of other early Earache bands through reviews in Metal Hammer, but I don't think we even knew about Napalm Death. I should mention that Metal Hammer back then was made up of endless articles about AC/DC, small features about Metallica, a cover story about Triumph or Uriah Heap, with small reviews of actual metal bands. To give you an idea of how behind the times we were in our beloved backwards country, the Metal Hammer issues we were buying at the supermarket for a good bit of money, were literally three years old! I'm not kidding! Imagine my shock when I found out that Cliff Burton had not only died, but they had already replaced him and were well on their way to sucking full-time! In any case, back to the story about my friend's mom.... she came back with the Peel Sessions tape from England. We heard it, and as you can expect, we were shocked. Now Slayer sounded like Bon Jovi and Def Lepard. It blew our mind, and I think it took some time for it all to sink in and make sense. Having heard this tape, the world of death metal, grindcore, punk, crossover and noise was open to us. Though some bands could be heavier, nothing seemed faster and more extreme than this recording for many years. I have to say, while many were bummed when Napalm Death released Harmony Corruption, I actually liked it...even if it sounded tame compared to Peel Sessions. It's still one of my favorite death metal albums of all time.






1991
Death-Human

Living in south-Florida during the formative years of American death metal was a great experience.Chuck Schuldiner lived in a storage space near our apartment, guys from Obituary were dating girls in my brother's high school, member of Cynic hadn't started to play in salsa bands in cruiseships...those were the days! It should come as no surprise then that I still feel that those early years of death metal were by far the greatest as far as musical output. Shortly after the Death album "Human" came out, I bought it and loved it instantly. Actually, I didn't buy it...I got this kid who I completely used for his money back then to buy it for me...but that's another story. Human was catchy and highly melodic, two qualities that were somewhat rare in other death metal bands back then. Yes, you could remember the general melodies to Deicide songs, but Death had taken it a step beyond. It reminded me of Iron Maiden, and that was a good thing. Perhaps that's why so many people grew to hate them. Another aspect of this album that blew me away was its complexity. In retrospect, the album is not THAT musically complex, but it opened my eyes to the possibilities. I know many people hate the fact that bands like Cynic or Atheist opened up Pandora's Box, and that inside that box was Fusion and Jazz...but I loved it. While Human was not as complex as some of Atheist's music or Cynic's, this album connected with me and showed me that complexity could be metal, prog could be metal...hell Jazz could be insanely enjoyable. Sadly, like many great moments in music, I believe that albums like Human, and most Swedish death metal are to blame for letting in a fair number of short haired beardos into metal. But what can you do? That's not Chuck's fault! Go blame the beardos! You gotta crack some eggs in order to make an omelet.




That's it. I guess since 1991 I've had no musical breakthrough moments in the realm of metal. That shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone who knows or understands my taste in music. I've had plenty such moments outside of metal, but I guess in my eyes, little has been done that matters in any way since 1991 within metal. Yes, I've listened to some bands after then and liked them a good bit...but I have not heard anything after Human that sent me into a different branch of the metal tree, if you will. I'm sure some of you disagree, but this is my opinion. An opinion that sounds an awful lot like the old man who is still going on and on about how The Beatles were the last great band, or the Greatful Dead fan who refuses to acknowledge the mere existence any musical output after 1972. I guess I've joined their club...and to tell you the truth, that's just fine with me.

Grindcore bands: Why even bother with songs?

With bands like Praparation H, Mortician, Meatshits, or Gut, sometimes you have to listen to a full minute of porn or horror movie samples before you get to the actual song, which is only 1 second of noise. It was funny in 1991, but it got old a long time ago. So I was thinking, why not just do away with the songs altogether and just make a whole album of intros. With the exception of the old masters like 7MON, Nuclear Death, Ulcerous Phlgem, and so forth, grindcore is a wretched, shitty genre anyway, so I can't imagine anybody will complain that there isn't any "music."

That said, I think it is safe to say that the entire porn and horror genres have been stripped bare of samples (thanks to the bands on Razorback, Wild Rags, and zillions of third-world, cassette-only labels). Here are some thoughts on new genres to exploit:

Romantic comedy
I love anything with Ryan Reynolds or Hugh Grant in it! Especially Hugh Grant! I literally laughed so hard I was crying uncontrollably and my stomach was in pain during Bridget Jones 2. One great sample would be from Bridget Jones 1 where she tries to impress him by saying, "Isn't it terrible what they're doing in Chechnya?" and Hugh Grant says, "Oh Jones, I don't give a fuck!"


Historical fiction
These movies usually have lots of horses, crying, and sheer fabric in them. They're not really my cup of tea, but it would certainly be an interesting change of pace for the next Anal Blast album to feature samples from Atonement, King Arthur or Little Women. The one good thing is that these movies sometimes have super hot chicks in them like Keara Knightly and Winona Ryder (ask Lucho Metales about her). Sometimes the chicks will show their tits in them, too, and it's cool because it's art.

Movies with Jason Statham
Basically if Jason Statham is in a movie, you can guarantee it will be fucking awesome! Both Transporter movies, Crank, the Bank Job, the guy is a genius. He's tough but sensitive, funny but cool, and has a black belt in body karate! I definitely think him and I could be buds, and some of his lines would be perfect for a wigger slam record.


Taught political thrillers
Next to romantic comedies, this might be my favorite genre. Unlike punk rockers, metal bands are patriotic and know why America is great. So perhaps some clips from Shooter or The Bourne Identity would be a nice fit. Grindcore bands can be a little on lefty side, so this could be a stretch... but I just wanted to put it out there.

Documentaries
I would love to hear the Meatshits use some samples from Nova, or perhaps "A Brief History of Time." I mean a band like Oxiplegatz, Origin or Cynic would have no problem finding a place for some stuff about quantum physics. But what would really be great is to invade the Razorback vaults and replace all the samples on the Lord Gore or Dead records with samples from that stupid spelling bee movie or Infamy.