Sacred Reich

What a swell looking bunch of guys. In 1991 I thought Sacred Reich were superstars, who probably toured in fancy double-decker bus. In reality, they looked like child-molesters traveling around the country in this horrible wood-paneled monstrosity. Nice trench coat, oh...and nice Hustler magazine in the back as well (under the speaker.)

This post is kind of long. I understand if you don't want to read it, or if you hate the stuff I post....but do me a favor. If you are not going to read it, at least watch the video at the end of the post. For real. You'll thank me. Okay, now let's get started:

Sacred Reich used to be one of my favorite bands back in the day. I was always drawn to pseudo-political bands within the realm of metal. As I've said many times before, I grew up in South America, I grew up during a time when extreme violence was a daily occurrence. As a result, songs about devils and satan never seemed all that scary to me. Everyday reality, and the things that actual humans (not demons with tails and horns) were doing around me were far scarier and very real. Perhaps for that reason, bands that talked about actual situations seemed cooler to me. In retrospect, the views that such "political" bands put forth were half-baked, idiotic and in keeping with their age and level of education...but back then they seemed so damn profound to me.

Check Phil out, 548 pounds ago. I always loved the cholo graffiti writing they used in their records. It gave them a certain edge over bands like Toxic. They also had that cool mascot. You can read more about the macot here. Man, if guys that looked like this had gone to my high school, I would have had huge man-crushes on them (in a very hetero way, dont get me wrong). Check out how Phil and Wiley (what a name) are posing the exact same way...even the angle of their feet is the same.

As good as they were, they fell victim to the classic thrash metal trap. They wrote the required "goofy song". In their case, the song was called "31 Flavors", and was meant to teach us about how we should listen to all kinds of music..but mostly Red Hot Chilli Peppers. The lyrics alone are enough to make you dry-heave for a few hours. Note the awful sexual double entendre. Even Dave Mustaine had to cringe upon hearing it, and he's the guy responsible for the most cringe-inducing lyrics ever. Remember his sexual opus Mechanix?


Vanilla is smooth
chocolate is kickin'
strawberry is sweet
all deserve a hearty lickin'
have em all
three scoops piled high
variety is the spice of life
Well you can have soft serve
and hard sugar cones
root beer floats
or my banana split
do you like nuts
or some sticky whip creme
come lick it off
and be my dairy queen
I love the Chilis
freaky, uplift, mother's milk

If you haven't listened to the song before, here it is. Again, get ready for major douche-chills.





So what happened to these musical and political geniuses over the years? Has time been kind to Sacred Reich? Hell no. Phil looks like a cross between a fat little league coach and Fred Flintstone. What can you do...time does that to you. Dark Angel was right. Time Does Not Heal. Apparently, it just makes you fat. They have a MySpace page, but I think it's way more fun to look at their official site, which is hosted by the one and only Angel Fire. Check it out. It was put together by Wiley himself.

Note the heavy crease on his neck as a result of being fat and having gravy running through his veins.

So over time, they may have deteriorated. What can you do. I pretty much stopped caring about Sacred Reich after "Independent", which is when they embarked on some lame pro-pot tour sponsored by NORML. I was bummed about them doing that tour back then, I'm not sure why. What can I tell you....to say I've had an overactive super-ego from a young age would be an understatement.

This picture hung on my wall for many years. Check out Barney's sweet Zubas.

Around the time that Sacred Reich went out on the "legalize it" tour, I bought my brother a sweet Sacred Reich shirt for his birthday. I believe I've written about this before, but I'll mention it again. He wore it to school on the day of his birthday, and got into bad car accident on his way back home from school. He got blood all over the shirt. I was bummed about the crash, but also about the shirt. The back of the shirt had a Socrates quote, "The unexamined life is not worth living." I'm incredibly ashamed to admit this, but I'll tell you anyway. I have actually quoted Socrates to really smart people before, and I only know the quote because of that shirt. So even though I could make fun of Sacred Reich for ages, and mock them (and I often do), I have to thank them because they made me feel cool in a group of smart people. Perhaps they weren't impressed, but I was certaily pleased with my use of the quote. Thank you Phil Rind!

Say what you will about Sacred Reich, but how many bands will help you quote Socrates at a dinner party?

Oh by the way, do you remember how Lemmy had a Sacred Reich patch on his denim jacket back in the early 90s? It was a Sacred Reich patch, but he only had the part that said "Reich"? He always talked about how he was a collector of WWII Nazi stuff, but always cleared up that he was not racist or a nazi. I get it, and I understand how this is possible...but walking around with a "Reich" patch on your jacket and a Nazi officers cap is kind of a douchy thing to do, to put it mildly. No? Come to think of it, Sacred Reich is kind of a messed up name for a band. I mean, it could easily be the name of a white power band, you know? Perhaps that's what first attracted Lemmy to the patch. I know many of you think Lemmy is rad, and everything he does is amazing, and perfect....and you probably think the Cocoa Puffs on his face are sexy...but come on. Damn it.




Okay, let's get back to Sacred Reich. I will now leave you with the best bit of Sacred Reich material available on the interweb. This is an excerpt of the Sacred Reich DVD, and its a winner for sure. This clip is filled with amazing treasures, because it's a perfect time capsule of the era. I won't even try to comment on it, or point out things about it. Just please watch the whole thing and enjoy it. Please. If you are too young to know what metal shows were like in 1991, this should give you a pretty good idea.

Wigger slam update, winter edition

There's a new dance craze that's sweeping the nation. It's called wigger slam and it's causing devastation!

It's been a while since we made a wigger slam post, which is a tragedy that makes Darfur look quaint by comparison. I would trade the lives of every single Romanian orphan for a single chance to play the Repudilation discography on my iPod while I'm in line at Starbucks. Seriously, fuck those kids, they're as good as dead anyway. In any case, there have been some exciting developments in the wigger slam scene that need to be mentioned.

Composted's SLAMBULANCE shirt
While it is disappointing to see that brutal death band Composted don't appreciate wigger slam like we do, we are still excited to see them raise awareness for the genre with the shirts you see below. The band is only mediocre (even to someone like me who has extremely low standards for slam metal- I mean I listen to fucking Artery Eruption!), but you might think about paying their MySpace a visit anyway. I'm sure it would make their day, since they probably spend all day bagging groceries or something to scrape together a pittance that pays the rent on the room they share with 8 other disgusting creeps at the local dirtbag metal flophouse. I'm sure glad I was never stupid enough to be in a band.


Entorturement vocalist drops some science
We have some insights on the origins of wigger slam from none other than the originators of the genre, Entorturement (and also the band who can legitimate claim to the worst name ever). He chimes in on the comments to an older post of ours, "The Facts About Wigger Slam":

LOL! This is Tim (former vocalist for entorturement). This is funny shit. Ok, yes Repudilation was the first to actually infuse a bit of Jazz into Death Metal. brian, their drummer, joined us and we wanted to do something different. So we went all out combining internal bleeding and suffocation with jazz,NYHC and Hip Hop. Growing up where we were you listened to Hip Hop. That was just how it was, mainly just NYC groups like Wu-Tang,Nas, Jay Z. It was like you are death metal (or deadhead,or jock) and you listened to hip hop. I am sorry for people taking it wayyyyyy out of hand. All the "thuggery" was taking the NYHC attitude at the time and multiplying 10 fold. In general, making fun of them.

Note that New Yorkment left them a nice comment on their Last.fm page:

OH FUKKKKKKKKK YEAH SON THESE BE THA SIKKKKKKKKEST SLAMZ EVAH!!! TOTAL BEATDOWN BRUTHAZ STYLE FO LYFE!!!

Amazon opens a wigger slam store
MI reader Matt Smith from Relapse tipped us off to Amazon's new wigger slam store. I'll be honest, the selection is a bit lacking (currently just a few Dying Fetus and Devourment shirts), but I'm happy to see that a big company like Amazon sees the potential for developing this market. I am sure that once they start producing Katalepsy and Abominable Putridity arctic camo parkas they'll have trouble keeping them in stock. MAKE IT RAIN!! I'm hoping they can hook up with Paul Wall and make some Soils of Fate grills. That shit would be HOT, and I'm sure all the European wiggers would eat it up. As anyone who ever sold anything metal-related in the 90s know, Europeans will buy anything!! I mean, without them, Joey DeMaio would have been out on the streets decades ago, picking cigarette butts out of the trash and selling Diet Mountain Dew cans for food.

See the store here!


Frogkill: World's first self-identified wigger slam band??
Perhaps I'm tooting our own horn here, but it seems that our influence has spread as far as Germany. We have been singing the praises of wigger slam for a while now, but it has so far been a externally-applied label. And to be honest, bands are generally not that stoked when we call them wigger slam (like these comments from that butthurt pussy in the Virginia-based wigger slam band Short Bus Pileup). A new one-man band named Frogkill is the first band we are aware of to call itself wigger slam, which is an amazing thing to behold! Congratulations, my friend! You are blazing new trails!We especially liked this statement on their MySpace:

And God said, "Let there be guttural slamming sickness!",
And there was guttural slamming sickness.
And God saw that it was good.

Now here comes the sad part. This poor kid is probably 19 or 20, and instead of sowing his wild oats banging hot German scene girls, he's spending his free time trying to impress internet metal nerds by making a one-man wigger slam band! Kid, you are going to look back on this part of your life and cry your eyes out at the way you pissed away the best years of your life. But congratulations on amusing a bunch of jaded metal dorks in their 30s at the expense of your youth!


Last.fm tags up 182%
Finally, thanks to everyone who has been dilligently using the wigger slam tag on Last.fm! If you haven't already, please tag all the relevant tracks you can. Fight the good fight! I'm not sure how Fall Silent got in there, but that's pretty funny.

Retroview: Pantera discography

Pantera is, without a doubt, one of the finest bands ever to set foot on planet Earth. I can't speak for other parts of the galaxy, maybe one of the guys from Nocturnus can shed some light on that, but I do know that if you want to experience POWER GROOVE here on the third rock from the sun, you must jam some fucking Pantera.

Dimebag RIP
First, let me address the tragic death of Dimebag Darrel. As you will see from the rest of this post, I am a huge Pantera fan, but I have to be real on this one. Damageplan fucking sucked and you can totally see why someone felt like Dime deserved to be shot for defecating on the corpse of Pantera by starting that band. I mean I can totally imagine myself saying "He should be shot!!"

The glam years: Not on the exam

The beginning: The glam years
Many internet metal nerds would probably spend a lot of time making fun of Pantera's early records which as most of you surely know are unbelievably gay. I am not going to do that because their other records are so fucking sweet and I would rather focus on them. Enough said on that subject.

Fuck yeah dude, look at how much of a badass Phil is. He's all, "You talkin' to me?!" And Rex is all, "Yeah, that's right, what are you gonna do about it?"

Cowboys From Hell (1990)
There are certainly a fair amount of people who think this is the best Pantera album, but I think they are "I only like the demo" types who try too hard to be different. It is definitely totally fucking awesome but it also has some real stinkers like "Cemetary Gates" that keep it from rising to the top. Oh and "Psycho Holiday," ugh, what a fucking turd. That said, the mosh parts in "Primal Concrete Sledge" and "Domination" are ungodly brutal and most definitely the prototype for countless awesome 90s mosh bands like Earth Crisis and Abnegation (for better or worse). Also, the title track might be the best song ever written, I'm not sure. It's either that or "Wake Me Up" by Wham! A lot of people seem to think this record was a big Exhorder rip off, which I guess it sort of is, but the songwriting is so much better that it's not an issue as far as I'm concerned.

The less extreme version of Phil's undercut, popular on females at the time. I'm still not sure what the benefit of shaving the upper neck is.

Vulgar Display of Power (1992)
Now this is where things get REALLY good!! This is when Pantera created a NEW GENERATION OF POWER GROOVE! Also, Phil had one of those haircuts where it's long on top but shaved all around the sides. If you saw Prong, White Zombie, or Tool in the early 90s, you saw lots of these haircuts. Anyhow, from beginning to end, this record fucking shreds. Well, except for "This Love" which was a total puss move. "Hollow" was also gay, slow, and far too long, but the mosh riff at the end is super brutal so it makes up for the rest of the song. But "Mouth For War," "Rise," and "Live In A Hole" are fucking classics. Lots of lame football types liked "Walk," which is a good song and I like it too, but they kind of ruined it for me. But overall, this must be considered their finest release and the definitive Pantera album.

Apparently there is a car called the Pantera. I don't really know anything about that, but this looks like a sweet place to get high and listen to Pantera (probably somewhere in Snohomish County, Washington)

Far Beyond Driven (1994)
When this album came out, I wasn't really ready for it. I think this is where Phil started to come unglued so there are lots of weird, longer songs on here that are obviously the product of an insane junkie. They drag the average down, but this one also has some of Pantera's finest songs such as "I'm Broken," "Shattered," and of course "Strength Beyond Strength" which is definitely one of the very most underrated Pantera tracks. Overall, this album is kind of a mixed bag: Half face-ripping awesomeness, half weird crap that makes you race for the fast-forward button on your AM/FM cassette Walkman. Lots of people I went to high school with would listen to this album while sitting on a rock in the woods and smoking pot and wearing a Starter jacket. In retrospect, I should have joined them instead of writing zines in my parents' basement.

I wonder what the 8 year olds that manufacture these in Bangladesh think they are? They're probably too busy getting flogged by the Blue Grape plant manager to think about it.

The Great Southern Trendkill (1996)
This is another hit and miss record. It has some of their very best songs like "The Underground In America," "Floods," "Suicide Note Pt 2" and "Sandblasted Skin," but some seriously shitty shit that just goes on forever and sounds like the dull ramblings of a self-centered junkie. Which I guess it is. Why is it that drunks and junkies always think that they are so interesting? They just go on and on about whatever trivial bullshit is in their brain, writing what seems to be an endless stream of books, songs, and movies about it. Someone should tell them how gay it is (although I did like the last VOD album a lot). It's certainly not interesting, novel, shocking or noteworthy in any other way. It just reminds me of my parents.

By the way, I was recently watching the Cowboys From Hell VHS, and was startled at how unintimidating Phil was. At the time it seemed like he was such a bad looking dude, but looking at him now he just looks like some surly, white-trash guy that you would see at 7-11 stocking up on Mountain Dew before he goes off to his roofing job. His physique is definitely not impressive at all, which isn't how I remembered it.

Phil's "Look how trve I am" phase was cringeworthy

Reinventing the Steel (2000)
This is sad. With a band as great as Pantera, you would hope that they could go out on a high note, but it didn't work out that way. I tried so hard to like this album, but it's just not that good. They probably phoned this one in, and it shows. Basically it feels like the blueprint for Hell Yeah to me: flimsy, hackneyed riffs and NO POWER GROOVE whatsoever. Disappointing, but what can you do? Just put Vulgar Display in the tape player instead of this.

Waking The Cadaver: When wigger slam goes TOO FAR

There's no time for love, just time for hate!!

You know what I love? Fucking Fury of V. Back in the mid 90s, when mesh shorts, Tommy Hilfiger tank tops, and visors were the order of the day, Fury fucking held it down. Nobody fucked with those guys!! And if they did, they caught a Jersey-style beatdown! Those were the days, my friends. But you know what I don't love? When Jersey shore wiggers play crappy slam metal. And that brings us to Waking The Cadaver, a budget wigger slam band from somewhere on the Jersey shore. There many things wrong with WTC, but you can boil it down to three main issue:

1. They are the wrong kind of wiggers
When Japanese people or Europeans try to be wiggers, it's cute. It's kind of a novelty, like dressing your cat up in a funny costume or women's sports. With chavs or that weird jumpstyle dancing, you can excuse it because they're Euros, which means that they might as well be infantile retards so you can't really hold it against them. The problem here is that WTC are real life, authentic American wiggers, and nobody wants more of those.

Big pants waste precious fabric
(I stole that line from some 90s punk comp)

2. They are popular with Myspace homos
Perhaps because of their hardcore origins, WTC became an interweb phenomenon among suburban 17 year olds with girl jeans and Myspace haircuts. The results? Well... you can see below- it's not pretty:

Like Job For A Cowboy, Despised Icon, and whatever other atrocious bands are playing this wretched style, this is reason enough to hate WTC.


Note the abundance of wiggerish arm movements at around :35

3. Absence of quality control
The fact that there is a wigger slam band that I do not like should be the first sign of trouble. As MI readers know, my standards for slam metal are not exactly high. For example, I love Artery Eruption, although when I played them for Lucho Metales, he said "Dude... come on. We could do that in my garage in like 45 minutes." And he was right. Yet WTC is below even my laughably low standards for wigger slam metal.

Let's begin with the name of their album: "Perverse Recollections Of A Necromangler." Necromangler?? Again, if they were Japs or Euros, it would be fine (for example, Blunt Force Trauma's song "Fight In Anus" is great). But they don't have ESL as an excuse.

Cypress Hill sticker on guitar = not OK

The lyrics are pretty much what you would expect from the Einsteins that invented the word "Necromangler":

Countless nights getting twisted
extreme illicit substance inhalation.
Fuck...I'm craving some penetration
because hoes, let me tell you,
i do it unprotected like its my occupation,
and guaranteed
your puckering up your lips for a spraying.

Now keep in mind I am a huge Meatshits fan, so it's not like I am particularly demanding or looking for anything intellectual. But this is on another level of subhuman stupidity, something like what you would expect from Insane Clown Posse. For example, I think this verse from "What Is A Juggalo?" could be WTC lyrics:

What is a Juggalo?
He just dont care.
He might try to put a weave in his nut hair.
Cuz he could give a fuck less what a bitch thinks,
He tell her that her butt stinks, and all that.

WTC or random shitty hardcore band on Back Ta Basics? You be the judge.

As for their songwriting skills, rather than think of something witty myself, I will plagiarize some review from Encyclopedia Metallum instead:

I'm serious, the only riffs on the album are so mindlessly simplistic, the arbitrary blastbeats are the only thing that seperates them from being breakdowns themselves! If that's not enough, the only thing more "brootal" than the breakdowns is the breakdowns WITHIN the breakdowns. And the meta-breakdowns. And the resulting breakdowns whenever the band decides to cool off after "breaking it down".

Meta-breakdowns!! That is what we call solid gold.

The next one is entitled "Writhing In Menstrual Clots"

I am a huge fan of the Canadian band Orchidectomy, because not only are they brutal as fuck, they are a good example of how broad the wigger slam genre really is. For example a lot of people would think of them as maybe grindcore or brutal death metal, but that really couldn't be further from the truth. The proof is in this live video of them playing "Writhing In Menstrual Clots." Look closely and you will see he's wearing a pot leaf hat- a sure sign of wigger slam!



Next time you're listening to death metal, keep an open mind. See if you can find any subtle clues that would indicate you're listening to wigger slam.