XIII marked the point where Mushroomhead finally had the financial backing to deliver an all-out polished, nu-metal with bells on full length record. Their first "international" LP, XX, was a compilation of tracks the band had self-released in their early years, so XIII was the group's first album whilst being in the limelight. It is quite the departure from the jumbled, beautiful clusterfuck of XX and the records that came before it, but absolutely nowhere near as bland and grating as Savior Sorrow and the other records that followed it.
Yes, XIII stands apart from anything else in the Mushroomhead canon, in its own perfect little storm. I don't like to think of it as the sound that represents Mushroomhead, but it is also a solid album and was a massive part of my early teens. It is also one of those albums that gets better as it goes on. Sure, it lulls a bit in the middle, but from track eight to the end is just pure belter after a belter. Closing tracks, "Our Own Way" and "Destroy The World Around Me" enter territory in the God Tier that the band would never stray into again. Top it all off with a cover of Seal's "Crazy" and you're laughing.
It might have marked the beginning of the end for this band, but XIII is a solid album nonetheless.
For some godforsaken reason I've spent the last decade or so defending this album. I've even claimed on social media (and also in public, after too many beers) that St. Anger is my favourite Metallica record. After a while, I realized that I wasn't actually trolling, and that I was being deadly serious. First things first though - that snare drum *definitely* explains my love for goregrind and the somewhat dubious genre production values held therein. I guess it also manifests unhealthily in my own drumming style, as my dustbin lid snare approach is sometimes raised as a chagrin point, especially during record sessions.
Anyways, onto Same Tango. A lot of the criticisms thrown at this thing do have ground behind them. I mean, yes, "Frantic" is fucking terrible. And yes, the songs go on way, waaaay too long. The low tunings and Hetfield's baffling, child-like lyrical ramblings only highlight how ham-fisted the band's approach at cashing in on nu-metal was. Unfortunately, not only did they fail terribly at doing so, but they dropped the album a long time after the genre uttered its last real death rattle.
That aside, this is my favourite Metallica album because its a shuffling, claustrophobic mess. It sounds like a rehearsal room recording, and it also contains some of the best shit Metallica have ever written. I raise you "All Within My Hands", "The Unnamed Feeling", "Sweet Amber" and "My World" for starters. "All Within My Hands" is easily one of the heaviest songs they've ever written, and its an interesting downward spiral listening to the whole thing unravel in the finale. "The Unnamed Feeling" (despite the cringe moment when Hetfield spits "get the PPPHHHHHuck away from me") has a simple yet bizarre riff structure, with two guitars chugging essentially out of time with each other and the drums playing stupidly heavy for a song so slow. Again, its a total fucking mess, but it works on so many levels.
I'm not going to be able to deliver an Anthony Fantano grade analysis of why this is the best record, but I think I've written enough on it, especially considering you're all just going to keep hating it. Oh-ahhhh!
Tell me this isn't the heaviest Metallica song (inb4 "Blackened").
The Amazing Jeckel Brothers is easily the weakest of the original set of joker's cards. In fact, I really don't have that much to say about this album at all. It has a few stand out tracks, but for the most part it is just irritating filler and a bunch of shit that just goes on way, waaayyy too long ("I Want My Shit" being a prime example). There's a terrible selection of "metal" songs too, and all the guest appearances from "big name stars" such as ODB and Snoop Dogg do absolutely nothing to buy this record any credit. In fact, the contributions seem almost stock in nature, especially from Mr. Dogg, and cheapen the entire experience further.
"I Stab People" and "Mad Professor" are the only tracks worth noting, as is the instrumentation of both of the Jeckel tracks, and that's literally all, folks. This was terrible in 1999 and it's still terrible now. You probably don't need me to tell you that, unless you have twisted hair and a penchant for Monster energy drinks. Avoid.
Hymns was the final album by Godflesh before they originally broke up in 2002. It seems to apply the no-nonsense aesthetic from records such as Pure and Slavestate to the band's later, more "nu metal" kinda sound as found on Songs Of Love And Hate and even parts of Us & Them. What's also quite nice to note is that Ted Parsons, who drummed for Swans on a fair number of their seminal recordings, is the drummer here. This is also the second, and final, Godflesh studio album to feature a real live drummer, and their first after being released from Earache.
I find Hymns is often overlooked. There are many Godflesh gems here, such as the opening belter "Defeated", which slows to a groaning crawl that really drags out the agonizing pinched harmonics. "Voidhead" is a painful listen (in a good way), taking the repetition of industrial into the nu-metal world kicking and screaming. Then, towards the end you've got the hat-trick of the venomous "Vampires", the ridiculously heavy "Antihuman" and the soaring "Regal" soothing you just before the skull-bashing closer, "Jesu".
Being a Godflesh record, there was a 50/50 chance that the cover art was going to be fucking shite. It kinda looks like it was just pulled off a Google image search, and the booklet doesn't really elaborate much either. The End Records and Music On Vinyl also did everybody a solid and put this out on vinyl in 2013, leaving Us & Them as the only Godflesh album not available on wax. Surely drum and bass belongs on vinyl, right? If I ever win the lottery I'll finance the repress myself, if Digby lets me buy the rights. Anyway, I'm rambling. I'll fuck off now. Listen to this:
Yo dawg, we heard you liked Korn so we made you a Korn to release after your Korn (but not before the other Korn). Who's putting out all this Korn you ask? Well, fucking Korn, of course. I mean, how much Korn could a Korn fan konsume, if a Korn fan could konsume Korn? Korn obviously don't think that kontinuing to kall albums Korn, even though they already have records kalled Korn - now totalling three Korns - is konfusing. But, for me, as far as Korn are concerned, in regards to Korn, Korn and the third (and thus-far final) Korn, Korn finally have enoughs Korns recorded. This here retrospective review is about Korn's second album kalled Korn, ingeniously entitled Korn. To konfuse things further, this record is sometimes referred to as Untitled, although it is in fact, titled Korn. Hopefully that has cleared that up.
I hope that the above enormous paragraph of wanton shit talking has given you a brief idea of how much I am struggling to write anything of any worth about this particular Korn album (the second Korn album to be kalled Korn). Take A Look In The Mirror and See You On The Other Side saw the band reigning in their sound a bit, and Korn (the second Korn) furthers this trend, with the band seemingly becoming nothing more than a studio project with session musicians at this point. The lead single, "Evolution", whilst not a bad tune, is just krap to be honest, in the way that if that's the best this record can offer for a lead single, then we are pretty much fucked.
Check out one of the odd decent tunes on this forgettable part of Korn's discography:
So I finally took the plunge and came around to dealing with this record. *Deep breath*
After the absolute stink-fest of Saviour Sorrow and the suicide-inducing snooze-fest of Beautiful Stories For Ugly Children, I had all but given up hope on Mushroomhead. Then I heard J Mann would be guesting on the latest record. And then I heard that the plan to collaborate had been scrapped and J Mann had returned permanently. Fuck! And then, finally, this album dropped. I pretty much went about doing everything in my power to try and ignore it, until I started reading about how this new shit is gonna please all the old fans; how the band have brought back so much of their old-school vibe. It wasn't just band interviews; fans on forums, Facebook and the landfill that is Youtube's comments section also chipped in ecstatically that this was the case.
So I listened. Yes, there is heaps of old school Mushroomhead in this. Fucking heaps! The keyboards take on a more carnival vibe, and there's even rapping again, for fuck sake! I can't tell you how awesome it is to hear rapping in metal music again (never thought I'd say that). There's a few trying-too-hard-to-be-part-of-the-8-string-crowd tracks which do absolutely nothing for me, and if I'm honest I was enormously surprised at how shit this record isn't (I'm not counting the Adele cover with a dubstep drop in the chorus - I'm just going to blot that out of existence).
But - and it's a big but - jesus chriiiiiist this shit is a mess. J Mann rejoined, but Waylon also remained. I mean no disrespect to any of the vocalists for Mushroomhead, because they are all amazing, but there simply isn't enough room here for three of them. It doesn't help that when Waylon is screaming, he sounds almost identical to Mann. The whole thing that made Mushroomhead work was the unique dynamic between J Mann's lows and Jeffery Nothing's extremely identifiable voice. Waylon is a phenomenal frontman, boasting a veritable arsenal of vocal styles, but there just isn't room on these quirky three or four minuters for three seperate vocalists. Throw in vocal appearances from Skinny's new girlfriend and 10,000 Cadillac's Jus Mic, and everybody is literally fighting for space to spit. It's ridiculous, to be frank.
Nevertheless, I believe that The Righteous And The Butterfly is a step in the right direction for a phenomenally talented band that has been wasting itself on boring redneck metal for nearly a decade. TL;DR version - a million times better than both previous stinkers combined, but still a bit of a mess.
But you gotta admit they still look cool as shit - probably cooler looking than ever, actually.
It sometimes seems a bit detrimental to do reviews on albums
that are really old, but as I trawl through covering a little bit about every
piece of music in my collection (yes, that’s still an aim of Lines In Wax,
despite the recent abolition of reviewing individual formats) it becomes an inevitability.
A lot of people can take or leave Korn. In fact, I know tons of people who
absolutely hate Korn. But, this album had a massive effect on the metal and
alternative scenes in the early 90s. Maybe not as much as Korn would like to
think (Jon D reckons Korn laid the template for dubstep, for fuck sake),
but it can be blamed for cementing the nu-metal genre fully into existence and starting
a mainstream craze in downtuning guitars. You can also blame this record for
Sepultura’s Roots. Uch.
Korn is a rough but disciplined record. It has messy, raw
metal hanging off a military-precise hip hop backbone, with Jon Davis
attempting a more grunge-style vocal approach here than the famous whines and
barking sounds that he would later become renown for. “Blind” introduced the
unsuspecting world to the sound of Korn, whilst “Clown” was not only just
another single but my favourite track off this album. There’s also the
hat-trick of “Predictable”, “Fake” and “Lies” that lead towards the
controversial, monstrous closing track, “Daddy”. I’m still not sure to this day
if I like “Daddy” or not, but this album (or even Korn) would not be the same
without this track.
All in all, Korn’s self-titled is a classic (or is that
Klassic?) for me, and a definite staple in the evolution of metal music. It
might have led to some pretty drastic music over the next decade or so (rap
metal? Uch…) but it still gets the odd semi-regular spin. I’m looking forward
to the 20th anniversary tour for this album – even if it doesn’t
come near me, I’d love to hear the band play through it again 20 years older
and (presumably) wiser.
I would like to admit that this album is a guilty pleasure of mine, but I'd probably be pushing it a bit too far. Digimortal is a strange one - a rare result of an industrial-influenced death metal band selling their asses out and cashing in on the nu-metal craze of the late 90s. Hey, I'm not saying Digimortal is particularly ground-breaking, but this came across far, far more successful than say, Cryptopsy's absymal weakening into deathcore territory. Both bands are prime examples of respected musicians abandoning their sound (and even fanbase) in a drastic attempt at getting ca$h moniez (perhaps through record label pressure or otherwise), but where Cryptopsy's crossover left them almost universally reviled, Fear Factory's dabble with nu-metal could even be called a triumph, thanks to one word: "Linchpin".
Ask anybody who has ever been into any metal or rock at any time if they know any Fear Factory tracks, and chances are they'll say "Linchpin", or at the least know the riff and opening lyrics. It was one of the most over-played music videos on MTV2, Kerrang! and Scuzz TV, and is still being played in crappy rock clubs the world over like it was last week's number one hit. Why? I have a theory. Rather than watering down their sound to conform to a trend, Fear Factory somehow just managed to cram their brutally heavy metal into the restrictions of their new genre. It might be nu-metal, but it's heavier than a neutron fucking star. The riffs are the same quick-fire, rapid-shot attack, the drums are the same pummeling, nail-gun barrage.
And this doesn't stand just for "Linchpin", I'm talking about the entire record here. Give it a listen! I recently dug this out after probably not hearing it for 18,000 years (it was spun drunkenly at a BBQ a few years back, but that doesn't count) and I couldn't believe how heavy this still sounds. I'm not saying it's gonna stand the test of time, but for what it is, it's pretty awesome, in my opinion.
We are about to take you into the world of the LSD user...
I've been on a bit of a nostalgia trip recently so I've been spinning this record an awful lot. When I was 12, life was all about Slipknot and Mushroomhead. Mushroomhead, despite having some dud album releases in the last decade or so, remain one of my favourite bands ever. I picked up XX on the strength of the band's image alone, fell in love with their music and spent the next year or so frantically hunting down the band's Cleveland-only released first three albums and two remix albums. I managed to hunt down their second album, Superbuick, on eBay, but the other two records were incredibly difficult to find, especially their third album, M3.
Then one day I saw one of those shitty ads in the back of K! magazine for companies that 'specialize' in 'rare' releases, who had Mushroomhead's first album in stock for £25. So after convincing my parents to 'lend' me £25, we rang them up. They had unfortunately already sold their one copy of Mushroomhead's self-titled, but perhaps rather unethically, offered to copy the CD for me before they posted it out to the original buyer. Despite this being really dodgy, coming from a legit CD wholesaler, I really wanted to hear that album, so the copy it was. I have since gotten a real copy (the repress on Filthy Hands) and even contemplated a real original, but have always dropped out at the last minute, unwilling to pay rediculous eBay prices. I went on to procure copies of all of Mushroomhead's self-released records (barring Remix 1997, which is basically a crappier Remix 2000), but all of them were Filthy Hands represses, apart from Superbuick.
In the face of adversaries who like to put Mushroomhead down, the usual weapon I've had to defend myself against is the statement that "Mushroomhead are just a bad Mike Patton impressionist band, man, they've never done anything original!". And yes, whilst Jeffery Nothing does bear resemblance to Mike Patton's Faith No More vocal performances, it wasn't until I got into Mr. Bungle a few years back that I realized how many similarities Mushroomhead owe to them. If you take the jazz and funk elements out of Mr. Bungle and replace them with truckloads of Twin Peaks samples, you've got the first Mushroomhead album.
This album is, in all honesty, all over the place. It is a total shambles from start to finish. The songs don't really flow, and they are often meshed awkwardly together with bad movie samples or crappy piano interludes. Despite introducing the world to the dynamic duo of Nothing 'n' J Mann, this is primarily a Nothing-led record. J Mann only solos one track to himself (the excellent "Ego Tripp"), backs up Jeff on the rest and is absent from 8 of the album's 14 tracks. But saying that, 6 of the albums tracks are devoid of either vocalist's contributions. To confuse matters further, there's a guest vocalist on the creepy-as-shit "Mommy".
Mushroomhead's self-titled was a strange debut into the band's psychedelic, multi-directional approach. The band's style, whilst unique, relies extremely heavily on external media and influences. I don't believe it was until the release of Superbuick and M3 that Mushroomhead really began to carve their own special take on things. My favourite tracks on this CD are "Slow Thing", "Elevation", "Ego Tripp", "Indifferent" and "Simpleton". I'd add "43" to that list, but the re-recorded version for XX is phenomenally better than this one, even if this one has a sample of Windom Earle laughing over the start of it, which is a nice touch.
If you liked Mr. Bungle but the ten-minute songs and the endless time changes got on your nerves: listen to this. If you liked XX and hated the direction the band went in afterwards, and aren't afraid of a slight drop in recording quality: listen to this. If you love Twin Peaks, Mike Patton and nu-metal, and have never heard Mushroomhead before: please, please, please listen to this.
You can now get your lugholes around any of the original Mushroomhead self-released CDs on Spotify, but here's a Youtube link anyway. Enjoy!
Man, now this is a blast from my past! I'd pretty much forgotten CKY existed for the last half a decade or so, until I saw this CD for sale for next to nothing in a charity shop. I forgot just how much I loved this band's first two records - I can't really speak much for the rest of the discography (An Answer Can Be Found was OK I guess, but Carver City does nothing for me at all) but this CD is an absolute classic!
After spinning this for the first time in probably 8 or 9 years, the first thing I notice is just how unique and odd CKY's guitar tone is. It is almost synthetic sounding, yet amply fuzzy and satisfying. "Escape From Hellview", "Flesh Into Gear" and "Sink Into The Underground" sound just as brilliant as I remembered them to. The rest of the album sails by really quickly, because CKY can't seem to write anything that lasts longer than 3 minutes or so. Not that I'm complaining, there are some great blasts from the past here, with the only song on the entire record I'm not at all fussed on being the closing track "Close Yet Far".
If your OK with your rock and metal having singy vocals and a pop-sensability to the songs, then I strongly recommend some CKY for you, if you've not heard them before, that is. This version of the CD comes with a bonus DVD directed by Bam Margera (he had to fucking worm his way in somewhere) filled with music videos for every single song on the album. Now that's value for money.
I had a little bit of a catch-up with Korn's mid-to-late 2000s releases on Amazon recently. For some reason, the young-me never picked up 2003's follow-up to Untouchables; Take A Look In The Mirror, which was unusual, especially considering that this was the last record the band did with the full original line-up. I really think Silveria's drumming, whilst not incredibly technical, is extremely unique, and is noticeably missing from the later Korn stuff (as is Head's guitar work). That's not a diss on the drummers that came alongside / after him - it's just it is hard to not notice an unique style, if you get what I mean.
Unfortunately, the "original five"'s last record together wasn't the most inspired thing that they've ever done. It isn't necessarily bad in the grand scheme of things, but it is completely Korn-by-numbers, through and through. The whole thing smacks of their tried and tested formula, made even more consumable by the Untouchables-grade polished production. There's even a track ("Alive") where the instrumentation in the chorus (not the vocal) is pretty much exactly the same as "Need To" from their debut album (I've posted comparison videos at the end of the blog). I did some research and found out that "Alive" was the original version of "Need To" from Korn's first demo and it has been re-recorded for this record.
On top of all that, sneak 30 seconds of bagpipes in somewhere along the way and hey fucking presto - another Korn record. Also, I get the sneaking suspicion that this record has a similar deal going on as that with Metallica's Load and Reload; it came out suspiciously quickly after Untouchables (even more suspicious when you consider the gap between Issues and Untouchables) and has more or less the same vibe, minus the weird electronics shit that broke up the previous album.
So is this an album of tracks left over from the previous record? Maybe, maybe not. Does this CD sound like an album of tracks left over from the previous record? Yes. Yes it does. Despite this, things are still fairly heavy - I guess helping me to appreciate this is the full-band dynamic that would become absent on future records. There are some Korn klassics here as well; most metalheads know "Right Now", "Did My Time" and "Y'All Want A Single", but there are also some hidden gems in here, as well as some total fucking stinkers. If you love the klassic Korn template then pick this up because it's cheap as fuck everywhere now. If you don't, then, well, don't bother.
When Mushroomhead dragged themselves out of the Ohio backwaters onto the international "nu-metal" stage back in 2001, they presented metal fans around the world with a fresh and somewhat confusing sound. Mushroomhead's diversity is what made them so exciting; the infamous live shows, the crazy costumes, the "metal/is it metal?" thing they had going on - not to mention they had managed to sell over 80,000 copies of their first three albums entirely by word of mouth and from touring. It really is a fucking mystery how it took Mushroomhead eight years, three albums and a remix compilation to get signed. When Slipknot etc. exploded in 1999, the band felt that it's image had been stolen, but anyone with even the slightest bit of positive foresight could see that the way was now paved for masked crusaders, and it did not take long for Mushroomhead to rise from local oddities to "fame" on an international scale.
Roll on five years to 2006, and the music industry is done with Mushroomhead. "Nu-metal" collapsed, just like any other trend. If your band didn't have a bunch of black fringes and tight girl jeans you were fucked at any chance of success in metal, unless you could emulate a sound like Killswitch Engage. Mushroomhead were dropped from their major label (Universal), a fact I think they were actually happy about - and it was back to business as usual for the band; self-producing a record and keeping on touring. And then, as a crushing blow to mega-fans such as myself, vocalist J Mann quit the band. Mushroomhead quickly recruited another local performer, Waylon Reavis, as his replacement. In what seemed like no time at all, Mushroomhead were pushing a new album; Savior Sorrow. Holy fuck, I was excited! Despite the sheer pressure against them, one step forward two steps back and all that, the band had followed through and actually made a new album! Only, something was missing. Imagine the following said in the voice of Chris Tucker's character from the Friday movie; "Daaaaaaayum 'Head, you got lazy!"
Savior Sorrow is an absolute ocean of mediocrity: an ocean of bad redneck metal meeting crappy, half-arsed keyboard playing. Did J Mann really hold so much influence over the whole band? Because with him gone....Christ, they fucking suck! The whole dynamic that Mann and second vocalist Nothing shared is what made Mushroomhead, alongside the keyboard / synth driven messes that the band called songs. The keyboards here are stripped back to barely fuck all, as are Nothing's strained melodic wails, placing newcomer Reavis as the apparent focal point, a strange move considering the success of previous record XIII was mostly due to heavier songs led with Nothing's incredible vocal performances. Reavis isn't bad at all, it's just he is the full front-man package; singing, screaming, shouting, growling, and rendering Jeffery Nothing (sadly) useless. If I heard Mushroomhead for the first time with this record, I'd be like "what is the purpose of this other "Nothing" guy? He's better, but why is he even there?"
The band's guitar work has never ever been challenging as the songs were always led by keyboards and bass; the guitars were usually an afterthought, adding much needed punch. With the keyboards stripped back, Mushroomhead's limited chug-chug-chug-chug approach is tremendously fucking grating. Every single fucking bastard cunting song. Chug-chug-chug. Or chugga-chugga-chugga-chug-chug. Chug-chugga-chug-chug-chugga. Fuck me, can these guys actually play a guitar? I'm beginning to doubt it. My final gripe is that whoever mixed this album is a fucking cretin. The sound is paper thin with no low-end whatsoever and some of the vocal effects are excruciatingly high-end on the sound spectrum, causing all manner of unwanted distortion. STAHP. Y U DO DIS, MOSHRUMHED? Y? PLS!
Despite everything, there are a few good songs here. This is Mushroomhead after all, and no matter how awful they have become, they can't help but accidentally churn out something awesome. But that's it. Other than that I cannot shake Savior Sorrow from being the album that ruined my favourite band for me. At the time this dropped I started listening to a whole world of grindcore and death metal, and this just couldn't compare. Somehow, this record was also pressed on vinyl, but there is no fucking way I'm buying it again, ever. If my collection was destroyed in a fire I wouldn't replace Savior Sorrow. In fact, if my copy was destroyed by fire I think the world would be a better place.
By far the best song on the album, and that heavily uses an auto-tune/vocoder device!
Since I began listing not only my vinyl but my entire music collection on Lines in Wax, I knew the day would come where I would have to touch upon the questionable purchases I made when I was younger. Today that day has finally come. Scorn at nu-metal all you like, but I actually like this CD. I actually prefer it to say, I dunno, Deathcrush by Mayhem. Well, maybe not prefer. Wrong choices of words. But I find it more listenable.
I bought this when I was 11 or 12 years old. The live version of "Outside" was the most played video on Kerrang! TV and that's probably what made me buy Break The Cycle. Staind were quite lovey-dovey so I remember being pretty suprised at how heavy some of the songs were. What Staind have become or what they did with their career is not what I am discussing here, only what I am experienced with here on this album. A good half of this stadium-filling nu-metal record actually contains pretty good songwriting. Despite the chart success, both "Outside" and "It's Been A While" are extremely well crafted and catchy songs. Opener "Open Your Eyes" is a fairly grim affair, and "Pressure" is geniously heavy for something of this nature.
Other songs on the record don't really amount to much, but even the terribly angsty "For You" has one hell of a riff, and the uninspiring "Fade" is actually pretty thoughtfull under the boring fuzz. Staind as a group used baritone guitars and five-string basses before it was particularly well-known in mainstream metal, and this definitely contributed to the heavier-than-usual sound here. Sometimes it feels like the music is too heavy for the words. I read that somewhere before in an article about the band Kroh, but I definitely think it applies here better.
Hate me for writing about this if you will, but I don't particularly care. There's a lot worse to come! Ha Ha!
I've never been a big Linkin Park fan, even though Hybrid Theory was the first album I ever bought with my own money when I was 11 years old. I'd lost all interest by the time the second record came out, but when the third album came out around 2007 the band (or more likely the label) came up with the idea to release the singles off that album on mini 7" picture discs, which was pretty cool. I missed the first one but ended up getting Bleed It Out and Shadow of the Day before realizing that my money was better spent elsewhere.
I've tried to sell Shadow of the Day to no avail but will keep my hands on this version of Bleed It Out as it has an absolutely fucking wicked remix of "What I've Done" on the flip-side IMHO "What I've Done" was the last half-decent Linkin Park song, and this nastier, dirtier remix was right up my street, and makes it worth keeping this record. Out on Warner Bros., that I won't be linking to.
I got these two when they were around (I think) 70p each on the Earache store. An utter bargain! Every now and then they put the shit that I assume wasn't selling down to some retarded low price. Once I went on there and they had Adema 7"s for 10p each. I was almost tempted to make a large purchase and then build a fire out of Adema singles. That would have been a good day! Too bad I snoozed on that opportunity; said Adema records are now an extortionate 99p each. Life is not fair.
Anyway, onto the music. Decadent & Desperate is not one of the highlights in the Mortiis cannon if you ask me, but I got these anyway because I do intend to get all of his vinyl one day, even the horrendously over-priced era 1 ambient stuff. One 7" contains a pretty uneventful live recording and the other a remix of "Way Too Wicked", which is a fairly cool song. The wax is all black but limited (?) to 2000 copies, and I'm guessing there is a 1000 green and 1000 brown, but I could be wrong.
This here post is a very special one for me, because this D.I.Y. lathe cut piece was commissioned by myself last year. It contains music I made with a bunch of people that is slightly out of my normal comfort zone, but it was (and still is, in fact) a ripping good laugh to be involved in.
The Start! Start! band/project came about entirely by accident. It came about in 2009 when I decided to take my noise/grind project Fart Wank into a professional studio to record some proper tracks. On our shitty hand made releases I had played every single instrument, but to make it cost efficient I needed a full band to record live as a unit, thus saving hundreds of thousands in studio costs. Studio time isn't cheap, as I'm sure some of you are aware.
It was only myself and Tom (vocals) in Fart Wank at the time, so we enlisted two musicians that Tom had played with previously - Rich and Burra, who gladly agreed to help us out on guitar and bass duties respectively. On the day, the grind/punk nonsense was cut short as the beer flowed and the usual dickery that can only happen during expensive, precious studio time reared it's ugly head. It also turned out that we had failed to rehearse / decide on more than one song to record, so we turned to the bands Myspace page for our more listened-to Fart Wank tunes.
At the top of the playlist was a demo we had done a few nights previously called "Lady GaGa: I Would Do You". Tom had played bass on this, and it lurched horribly but rather funkily. The studio owner / producer, Chris, jokingly said something about producing a full blown dance remix of this song. Some time and autotuned vocals later, "Transexual Healing" was born. It recieved far more attention than any of the Fart Wank studio tracks and people started asking about who had made the song. Reluctant to tarnish Fart Wank's "grind" sound with such a poppy tune, we decided instead to continue in this new electronic vien and create a new group featuring the four of us as full time members. And thus, Start! Start! was born. Yes, it was all my fault.
Anyways, this here package is decievingly more than just a 7", it is a full on EP, as nestled within the hand assembled artwork is a CD entitled The Contents of Uncle Richard's Hard Drive, which is a bunch of tracks that won't be appearing on our up and coming, yet untitled album. The first two songs on the CD are both sides of the 7". The real purpose of the 7" is to act as a collectable, being a hand cut and all. The sound is cut in mono and is a lot lower in fidelity to that of regular vinyl, but I can't help but love the ultra-D.I.Y. aspect of it. Although, if I am honest, there are genres out there better suited to the sound lathe cut records can offer.
The 20 copies of this record were made in America by the simply-named Corporate Records, a very interesting project by Adam from Fuck Fuck. If you're well into your D.I.Y. shit, it would do you no harm to check out this website. Some of the records they offer are simply mind boggling, like a metal record, for instance, or concentric records; vinyl that splits into three parts. Play one part, two parts, or all parts. Sell them seperately and milk your fans dry! What boggles my mind the most that they can cut onto the underside of CDrs, taking the secret track concept to a whole new level.
As for Start! Start!'s music I can't really speak of it in the way I normally speak of other music on here, purely because I am involved in it. I do think that the b-side "Scene it all Before" is a bit weak, but for all your Welsh rap laced nu-metal needs, you cannot go wrong with side A and the CD!*
Before there was Skindred there was Dub War. I was always attracted to this band because of their awesome name. A war of dub? Sounds like my kind of party. Unfortunately I found Dub War a bit wet, not too shabby but very disappointing considering what I built them up to be in my head. My love for them sadly does not extend any further than this cheeky little single pressed by Earache (when they went off the fuckin' dial with signing weird shit) in 1994 on CD, 7" and 12". This here is the 7". The CD and 12" both contain more remixes and a separate b-side track, whilst this 7" only contains the title track and one boring remix that doesn't actually sound that much different.
Anyhow, die hard fans of Skindred should enjoy Dub War, and I'm sure they probably do. The song "Mental" is just that, Benji shouting a chorus of (i think) "absolutely mental!" over and over in a Welsh accent is very very amusing. That's about it. The rap is pretty awesome too. You can currently get one of these for £1 on Discogs, so if you like odd shit, get in.
