I just walked out of my office and nearly collided with a woman shopping in the back area of the store. While my inattention to people around me (both physically and emotionally, so I’m told) isn’t anything new what was different was that this lady, who was easily over 6ft tall and (I’m guessing) in her sixties had a posterboard stapled to the back of her shirt. On that nearly A2 (record humor) piece of cardboard was a homemade anti-abortion flyer, complete with an eight week old fetus and a bunch of shit about the sanctity of life. She reminded me of a few of the crusty (not crust) punks that I’d see on the Ocean City Boardwalk (to go back a few pieces ago) who would make their own patches using fucking magic markers and glitter and what ever other assorted crafting supplies they boosted from the grocery store. I was just as impressed with this lady as I was those guys, who I’m sure are still wandering around Ocean City but probably closer to the middle school than the boardwalk these days.
This happened on 9/11, which I had forgotten about (oops) until I saw the Hulk Hogan meme on my social media timeline. You can google it if you’re unaware. It was also the day after the debate where Trump talked about eating dogs and the “billions” of people who died in the Ukraine. This basically has been 24 hours of societal rot just draining whatever will I had to interact with the outside world. It made me wistful for the room in my house with my records where, if my daughter sleeps for more than an hour without me having to be right there to, I dunno, be security from whatever ghosts my cats see in the house, I listen to music privately. What have I been listening to lately, you ask? I’d love to tell you none of your fucking business but since you were obviously curious I might as well go over some of that.
For the record, before some of the more interesting and fun seeking of you out there open the grease trap above your chin, I’m all for the right to choose. Don’t believe in abortion? Don’t fucking have one. It’s like everyone has the need to be their own walking fucking bumper stickers these days.
One of the things that I’ve found enjoyable about getting older is that I’m still discovering bands from years past. My most recent obsession is, rather embarrassingly, a classic band in their genre and an influence on some of my favorite records. I’m speaking of German grindcore progenitors Blood.
Blood should have been a band I checked out thirty years ago, especially because of the Naked Whipper connect (I’ll get to that) but it wasn’t until a few weeks ago I decided to give them a listen, particularly the Christbait record, with Alex Schulze (Dominus A.S. of Naked Whipper) on vocals. Holy fuck, what an album.
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Grindcore with doom and black metal injected throughout, years before that became a subject line in some shitty band PR companies who abuse my inbox daily. I’ve known the influence earlier Blood (first album and demos, especially) had on Blasphemy, which by proxy influenced Beherit and the like, and yet this was my first total experience with them. So I figured I’d hop over to Discogs to see how much it’d run me to grab a copy and I was instantly depressed. $50 and above for a record when I know I could use that money on bills or mafia protection just isn’t responsible. So, I settled for Youtube. Same with the follow up, O Agios Pethane, a record which took the harsh black metal influence a step further, albeit without Schulze.
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While Christbait had a denser production, O Agios Pethane is a much filthier record. I’ve been spending more time lately digging back into the deathier side of black metal, especially the early 90s stuff like the aforementioned Beherit and Blasphemy as well as Black Crucifixion’s earliest recordings and Belial, so this record landed beautifully. I put it on my wishlist and continued on. About a week later I saw on Nuclear War Now!’s Instagram that they were reissuing the first three Blood records (including the debut Impulse to Destroy) a few days after the posting. It was one of those serendipitous moments, like things lined up just to remind you that it’s not all shit, until the asshole of the universe puckers up and gives you a lil kiss on the cheek. These moments are priceless.
The good one, not the shit peck given by stardust and the malice of existence.
I managed to grab the colored versions of both Christbait and O Agios Pethane, leaving the first record alone-which I now regret. But it’s the thrill of the hunt, or so I’m told. The reissues are beautiful, faithfully recreated from the original masters, looking and sounding great. NWN! Still has copies of all three available, just not the colored ones which only matters if you’re OCD like I am. It made me revisit an old favorite, Naked Whipper’s Painstreaks.
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Sometime in the 1990s I was in constant contact with Bernie from the Canadian band Lust, who was a wealth of knowledge regarding harsh and cruel sounding bands, helping me to discover things outside of Beherit and Profanatica that I was already deeply into. He had sent me tapes of Blasphemy’s Fallen Angel of Doom back when that was a difficult thing to come by, before there were eighty different versions out there and would talk about Bestial Summoning, Archgoat, and Naked Whipper. Keeping in mind this was a few years before the internet was widely used and sites like eBay made collecting less challenging, so trying to track down a copy of Painstreaks was a little difficult but through a few trades I was able to come up with it. That was one of those moments where you know a piece of music was going to have a direct impact on things in your life.
Raw, harsh and immensely cruel sounding black grind, Naked Whipper were like a sledgehammer to your teeth. It took some time but I was able to procure their self titled 7 inch, which is somewhat more feral than the album. A bit later I discovered there was another 12 inch ep, Moloch: Acid Orgy, floating around that would prove to be one of those white whales at the time. I don’t remember what I had to do to get it, I don’t think it involved genitals but this was years ago, but I remembered thinking it wasn’t as frenetic as Painstreaks. Still a mandatory listen, however.
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Some years later when I was running Blood Fire Death Records I had the idea of reissuing the Naked Whipper catalog since it was both extremely excellent as well as difficult to come by. Trying to track down Dominus A.S. was like hunting a fucking ghost. I had every friend I knew in Germany trying to get his contact information but it always came up short. I have one drunken recollection of being at Root and Destroyer 666 in Germany and literally yelling to anyone who passed by about finding him. Years later I would wonder why Europeans don’t find me as charming as I do.
About two years ago Dominus/Schulze reemerged, apparently fresh off nearly a dozen years in the clink for manslaughter and somewhat active again, with Iron Bonehead doing faithful reissues of the catalog and Naked Whipper appearing live. For right now, I have no idea if they plan on doing anything else, but if they don’t that’s fine. This LP and two EP discography is a perfect legacy of one of the nastiest bands to ever exist.
Finishing out my recent listening is the new album by Circle of Ouroborus, Ajattoman Uni, which was just put on Bandcamp last week. I figured that a new CoO album would be inevitable when His Wounds Records, who’ve done the last few, announced a late summer drop, but that didn’t make it any less exciting for me. Those of you who pay attention to my year end lists know that they tend to either take the top spot on years Kommodus doesn’t have a new full length or get very close. This has been a band that has been very close to my heart since I first heard them on the split with Urfaust two decades (!) ago.
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Ajattoman Uni is a bit of a departure from the last few records, being somewhat less dreary (still miserable) but injected with a heavy Celtic Frost/Hellhammer touch, a black/punk step into the very early 1980s. CoO has never not produced an exceptional amount of earworms every year they’ve been active but this time it’s almost nonstop. This is a fucking terrific record and I’m sure I’ll be bothering you with it in two months or so. Magnificent.
Finally, my Fuck Music Substack hasn’t seen much movement but I plan on changing that shortly. One thing that will change is the $8 subscription price, which seems a bit greedy considering it’s just going to be more of me blathering on about shit only I seem to find interesting. But there is a free option, so feel free (GET IT) to do that and I’ll try to put something together shortly.
See you again in a few weeks when the weather is finally cooling down and I’ll tell you all about the apple lattes I’ve been drinking.
