mercoledì 22 marzo 2017

Privilege Of Evil

Some saturday afternoon of 1993 I was, as usual, digging through New Zabrinskie Point's grind/ death/ black metal lps crate, looking for a way to spend the few money I've saved during the week. Instead of buying bus tickets or food, I used to save every lira I got to buy an lp during the weekend. I had just discovered death metal a few months earlier and everything was new and exciting to me and my friends. We usually bought records basing ourselves solely on how cool an album cover was or on the sporadic suggestion of older metalheads that were lurking around the shop. I bumped into a copy of Amorphis debut lp "the karelian isthmus" and was immediately intrigued by it. I liked the logo & the artwork and the guys on the back cover looked cool as fuck. Then I timidly asked to Stiv (the shop owner) if he could play it for me. While he usually blasted only Oi! or hardcore bands (and I've always suspected he hated metal in general), he was always extremely kind and friendly and played whatever we asked him. After the melancholic intro, "the gathering" erupted in all its slow brutality and a few seconds later I was immediately a devoted fan of this unknown finnish band. Flash forward to one year later. As soon as I found they just released a new album titled "tales of the thousand lakes", I immediately bought it. Of course again on vinyl simply 'coz back then they were cheaper than cds. Loved every single notes out of it just like every one else. While being weird and experimental, it was still brutal as fuck death metal! Expectation for the following album were of course high but when "elegy" came out in 1996, I was extremely disappointed. It wasn't metal enough for me and I simply lost interest in the band.

Recently I've been playing Amorphis first two full lengths a lot. While checking their discography on discogs, I've discovered their ep from 1993 titled "privilege of evil" that I've never heard of back then. It has just being reissued by Relapse in 2013 for the very first time on vinyl. After a quick listening on youtube, I immediately ordered a copy. While it came out one year after "the karelian isthmus", it has been originally recorded one year before it and was supposed to be a split lp with Incantation (!!). Here Amorphis doomish death metal was extremely raw and the melodies that characterized their sound were just outlined. The result indeed is not too far from other finnish death metal institutions from the same era (Demigod, Convulse & Disgrace above all). Three of these tracks are indeed a rougher version of songs that would be featured on their debut full length. Cherry on top, an Abhorrence cover, "vulgar necrolatry" with Jukka Kolehmainen (Abhorrence singer) doing vocals!! While you basically get only 2 unreleased tracks, this is an essential listening for all early finnish death metal maniacs! 

mercoledì 15 marzo 2017

FINAL EXIT (japan) interview 1996

Japanese premiere crazy noisecore heroes. 20+ years later, they're still around! Short but informative interview from their early days. Taken from Coroner's Report #3 from 1996.

mercoledì 8 marzo 2017

Excrete Your Own Shit!

Time to fill in some embarrassing gaps in my collection of two heavyweights of 90s grindcore. You know them since I've talked a lot about them in this blog: Warsore & GBN. Let's start with the australian undisputed kings of grindcore. Their split with Nee!, released in 1997 by Mortville Rec. was the last piece I needed to complete my Warsore collection (well, not considering all the posthumous releases that keep coming out). Scored it for cheap from a swedish dealer. Here these melbourne hillbillies have been captured at their peak: everything is balanced so perfectly without being overproduced that the final result is probably one of their best studio performance ever. Can't praise this band enough. As far as I know, this is their only release that came on coloured wax (or was the lathe cut with Egrogsid on clear?). On the other side,  dutch noisegrind  band Nee! pales in comparison. Poorly recorded and badly mixed (drums are way too high!!), they are just another number in the endless list of forgettable bands. 
I've been listening to Gore Beyond Necropsy a lot lately and since I still enjoy them as much as I did 20 years ago, I've decided it was about time to finally complete my collection. I've started with their split with tasmania's Egrogsid, released by Dry Retch twentyone  years ago. GBN was and still is one of the most extreme noisecore band ever. Started as another mere Carcass clone, they quickly morphed, or I'd better say mutated, into something deformed, scary & unique. Their ultra downtuned putrid sound, surrounded by a constant wall of feedback noise, mixed with some of the lowest growls ever and insanely fast drumming shaped what has become their trademark sound. Here they still used a drum machine and it fits perfectly in the gloomy atmosphere they created, making these eleven tracks sounding even more extreme. Not only GBN were a true aural butchery, their records also always looked damn cool. They had one of the most putrid logo (and band name) ever, all their artworks were dark and filthy and they used the coolest font ever for all their inserts/backcovers. No band pics were in their releases, adding more mystery to surround these japanese maniacs. The only one I saw in the 90s was a very blurry one featured in a zine. They simply built the perfect iconography for the putrid noise they played. Eighteen years old me was impressed just as much as forty years old me still is. Egrogsid performance on the other side aint bad at all. Filthy grindcore not too dissimilar to Warsore (with whom they shared some members). Overall, a very solid split release!