Just exactly what all you cynical sods need right now to counter-balance the sunny coming of spring and the saccharine, almost sickening, smell of the blooming flora - i.e. an antidote, as it were, composed of misanthropic doom/sludge rot laced with zesty spurts of scabrous hardcore punk. A monstrous concoction indeed which sounds like early Black Sabbath left under the boiling New Orleans sun for far too long. Should Eyehategod's Dopesick (Century Media, 1996) fail to bring forth the wanted results and a cheery predisposition persists then rejoice most fertively for you have just gloriously expelled yourself from the Miserable Bastard Club - the rest of us are already reaching for the razorblade.
"Far away, like the slight whistling of a breeze in the rigging before the storm, a shiver, a shiver without flesh, without skin, an abstract shiver, a shiver in the workshop of the brain, in a zone where you can't shiver with shivers. How, then, will it shiver?"
-Henri Michaux
Naked City were experts in the fine art of creating musical dadaistic hodgepodges comprising of western, grind, thrash and jazz, erratically switching styles within a few measures of a song. Surprisingly swansong Absinthe (Avant, 1993; CD) has absolutely nothing to do with their previous oeuvre. It's like the ultimate farce: a band that got people almost used to their frenetic unpredictability leaves the stage with an album remarkably tame in comparison. This particular tameness however is far more disturbing in its subtlety than anything produced in their erstwhile offerings. Mastermind John Zorn is here guided by his infatuation with the decadent movement of fin de siècle France and relies on atonal sequences laid against layers of noise and unsettling ambiance to conjure opium-induced images of candlelit rooms, filled to the ceiling with hashish smoke and otherworldly demons clamoring in the dark... All the while somewhere in the background, the Comte de Lautréamont lets out a snicker welcoming you into his nightmare. Easily my favourite unearthed gem for this year so far.
NY-based Terrofakt take a reductionistic approach in their composition removing all extraneous harmony or any sense of tonal progression leaving only rhythm: the beat here is EVERYTHING. Teethgrinder (Metropolis, 2006; CD) thrives on militant precision and relentless rhythmic delivery like a well-oiled war machine. Stylistically it aggressively asserts its place within powernoise territory alongside acts like Xotox and Iszoloscope. In the words of monsieur Stephen O'Malley: "Maximum volume yields maximum results."
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