SLAUGHTER OF THE INNOCENTS – ’10 SONGS OF PURE FAST KILLERGRIND’ DEMO

Slaughter Of The Innocent’s 2002 demo is old school noisy Grindcore mania mana just as it should be, a pitch-perfect blur of superfast brutal proper one-footed blast beats, rumbling grinding bass audial flood to loosen teeth and deathly guitars sawing out crusty mangled grind riffs, with low grunt high squawk vocal tirade, slamming and stomping from thrash to blast, a perfect summation of what the genre requires, a few goofy bad song titles aside. Total blast beat bulldozer! Even the obligatory Napalm Death and Repulsion covers are right on the fucking money, for all their lack of imagination. This could have come out a decade earlier and I’d be none the wiser. I was familiar with this band for their excellent split with the fearsome Sakatat, and I’m very pleased to have gone back to this demo. Fans of real deal Grindcore ala Dahmer, Warsore, Tumor or Gore Beyond Necropsy, take heed!

Bandcamp

PING PONG SELF TITLED

Rome-based imprint Raw Culture isn’t exactly renowned for its conservatism but the astonishing new album from Italian duo Andrea Renzini and Stephano Passini pushes the boat so far out it disappears over the horizon and gets crushed to matchwood by an alien species of squid. Lashed together from field recordings of Korean table tennis matches and a bijouterie of bizarre instrumentation (filter bag, aerosol flute, yoga balls), ‘Ping Pong’ is a riot of gnarly free jazz and motorik machine funk that charges, battering ram in hand, at the portal to a future of infinite possibility. The four pressurised jams that comprise the album’s A side (‘Master Ping’) showcase the band at its most organic and untamed. Cacophonous drum cannonades delineate a sequence of volatile grooves made all the more unstable by the miasma of caterwauling sonic detritus through which they corkscrew. It’s an outlandishly heady concoction, but the flip (‘Master Pong’, natch) is where Ping Pong’s singular vision comes fully into focus. Homing in on an irresistible sour spot ‘twixt Föllakzoid’s virulent technoid krautrock and the clammy sleaze-disco shenanigans of Decius, tracks like ‘Zilch’ and the jaw-dropping ‘Welcome’ are crammed with spadefuls of such dizzying detail they could trigger synaesthesia in a breeze block. Despite closing out with ‘Future’, a garish synth-punk hoedown that sticks out like a pilchard in a blancmange, there’s a pervasive sense here that Ping Pong are hovering on the cusp of a giant evolutionary leap; a metamorphosis into some higher, deeper and more vaporous form even they can’t conceive of. For now though, this is more than sufficient. Keep watching the skies.

Raw Culture

DREAMS WEST SELF TITLED

Mix tape from producer James West’s Dreams West project, a now classic and slightly forgotten cut of plunderphonic early vaporwave breeze. Ludicrously warped pastel delirium, vaporous and effervescent tape deck 90’s Pop loops embellished with intoxicating and absorbing sequencer melody, saturated and filtered to haze heaven. Microwaves of nostalgia…luminescent Pop Muzak, lo-fi Chillwave, vaporous recontextualization of Funk grooves, filter house claps for days of the dying sun. How absurd to think that this is already older than a decade, a shimmering simulation of pre internet music and muzak, a simulacrum now conjured and consumed ad infinitum to both greater and lesser result… interesting to note, Dreams West was using original melodies in their compositions right off the bat,  something that many of the first wave Vaporwave artists eschewed in their wake. Shitfaced hammered on screwdrivers, making meaning of a completely dead two dimensional capitalist consumer reality, Dreams West and their ilk render me to tears. So awash in narcotic emotion are these utterly ‘meaningless’ works, so flat and circular are these saccharine experiences as to become cartoons, revelations of truths so brazen as to require constant inebriation and euphemism to manage them. Keep on dreamin’, meat puppets. This has all got to mean something.

Bandcamp

ISMATIC GURU – ‘II’

Lo-fi liminal Post Punk weirdness polarity swing from the mad creative forces behind Science Man/Swimming Faith Records and Clump/Steak and Cake records. Razorwire taut, amphetaminic funky, cute little less-than-2 minute post punk no wave numbers dripping with pungent outsider swagger, hopped up on nitrous oxide and god knows what else. Gurning loopy badass crooner vocal commands the routine, a throb of cocky Bass lines saunter and groove beneath tongue lash treble guitars, cumulatively tapping out complex, intricate typewriter riffs and chord girdered to thin metronomic drums riddled with details and danger. Dynamic, melodious, minimalist brilliance. There’s an air of the likes of Minutemen or James chance and the Contortions, though neither of these references truly signposts the weirdo sounds within. Get into it!

Swimming Faith Records

FENTANYL TAPWATER / DISPOSAL UNIT SPLIT

Recent split on Ohio’s Bizzaro Warrior, filthy shirtless Sludgecore and idiot toothless Noise Rock. Fetty Tap’s tracks feature some burgeoning, burning hot Sludgecore contamination, headache aura ambience, blown out bass harsh noise squall, loping hardcore beats set pace fearsomely beneath impossibly mountainous bass chord beatings, tempos plummet and we are repeatedly lumped about the face and neck with swinging, downcast bass sludge hate, with deathly low vocal brutality, a killer addition to already difficult to swallow sound. Although operating in quite separate areas of Hardcore, this Fetty Tap material reminds me of Matt’s previous band Water Torture, less the blasts. And fuck me, the Poison Idea cover is just perfect, too. Disposal Unit then switches things up from previous Industrial-leaning releases with a scraping, emollient exhaustion of Noise Rockin’ malaise, very weird and leftfield, repeating low-chi obstinate gurning riffs met by lolling percussion clatter and an am-rep disturbed reverend vocal. Dulled edge guitars, slurred vocal spite addled with ritalin, despicable black mood music like a motherfucker. I could have done with one more track on the DU side, but this is a great split of complimentary, horrible sound. Dig in.

Bizzaro Warrior