There are few personas I admire more than GG Allin. Darth Vader, Michael Myers, Ted Bundy, and Nathan Gale might comprise all of that short list. But as an avid collector of the man’s recorded output, ranging from Brutality and Bloodshed for All to the Malpractice days, I am a music-first GG fan. I think it’s sad that all he’s remembered for is his ridiculously over-the-top stage show (even earning a cutaway spoof on a recent episode of The Cleveland Show for fuck’s sake). He was more than just a Shock Rock freak show to yours truly. He was a great songwriter who could pen a catchy tune like few can or ever will. That said, at least he’ll be remembered for something, and as I step down from my soapbox, I have to admit his live performances were hard to turn away from. This DVD serves to remind us just how captivating that bloody, shitty train-wreck was. Blood Shit and Fears captures five truly remarkable gigs. Remarkable in the fact that none of them end prematurely with GG leaving in the back of either an ambulance or a police car. The first three shows, from November of ‘91, showcase a fresh-out-of-jail, energized, focused, relatively sober GG Allin. I say that because all of the infamous chaos —shitting, shit-eating, shit-throwing, microphone forehead-bashing, and mic stand-launching— seems fairly orchestrated, and, as I said, GG makes it through the songs and sets in one piece. Fast-forward to the last two shows from May of ‘93 —just a month before his last show and untimely death— and you can see the difference. This fresh-out-of-jail GG is a bloated, incoherent, stumbling, vomiting mess who seems more interested in attacking crowd members than singing the lyrics. What a terrifying experience being in the audience must’ve been. The setlists from the first four gigs are nearly identical, with classic anthems like “Bite It You Scum” and “Outlaw Scumfuc” as highlights, while the last show works in more of the Brutality and Bloodshed material, GG’s bark a borderline Death growl by this point. Surprisingly most of these gigs look and sound fairly decent given the hazardous conditions they were filmed in and the equipment used. Overall, this is a solid collection of sets from the Murder Junkies era, displaying this troubled legend in all his reckless glory. There’ll never be another GG Allin, and there’ll never be a stage show as fearless and obscene as this.

There was a glimmer of hope when I discovered that former Opeth and Amon Amarth drummer Martin Lopez had formed his own brand new project, enlisting the legendary talents of four-stringer-for-hire Steve DiGiorgio (Sadus, Death, Autopsy, Testament) in the process. I assumed that Lopez, unlike his former iconic frontman, was not ready to succumb to old age and start making glorified Seals and Crofts albums, and that he’d attempt to keep the Death Metal flame alight with his new mates. I temporarily forgot what an ice cold bitch hope is, and couldn’t have been more wrong. While it can be argued that Cognitive does burn brighter with a higher sense of urgency than the sleepy cryonics project that Heritage was, there is no Death Metal here. Arguably no Metal at all. Soen sounds like Tool. I don’t mean that there’s a slight influence or that it’s often reminiscent, I mean Soen sounds exactly like Tool. From the tribal drumbeats to the bass tone to the vocal patterns, Tool could sue this band in court and win easily. And not the really good Tool (Opiate, Undertow), I’m talking about modern day, King Crimson-aping Tool like that found on 10,000 Days (which is ironically how long that album feels). Singer Joel Ekelof does have a great voice. His tone, oddly enough, is not a far cry from Mikael Akerfeldt, but every song here is the same quiet/loud/quiet trick. I have to wonder what he might be capable of when not forced to mimic Maynard James Keenan’s every molecule. Backed by a non-tribute band able to produce authentically emotional music, Ekelof could be something special. As for Soen, I guess if you’re in the mood for Tool, but don’t want to hear the real Tool, and you’re tired of the half-dozen more well-known bands that already sound like Tool, then Cognitive is your extremely pathetic dream come true.

In the realms of female-fronted Metal, most of the bands fall into one of three categories: Goth Metal, Power Metal or Folk Metal. Germany’s Lyriel is categorized as Folk Metal, but my guess is that this categorization is from their earlier material. Leverage is more along the lines of Goth Metal but with Folk Metal flourishes. Their violin player gets plenty of time, but this album has more in common with Lacuna Coil than it does with Turisas. Since this is my first exposure to Lyriel, I can’t tell if the shift towards this sound was gradual or if it is vastly different from their last album. The songs themselves are not bad, but if you listen to other bands in the Goth Metal genre (particularly the other female-fronted bands), they come off as being generic. By adding the Goth Metal stuff into their music, Lyriel isn’t becoming more distinctive, they’re actually becoming more plain. It’s marginally better than being too “out there,” but at the same time, nobody is ever going to look back on this as being their best work. I did like the music on this album but nothing here is groundbreakingly different. I would classify the music as being unadventurous more than anything else. The idea of fusing Goth Metal with Folk Metal sounds good on paper, but the actual execution didn’t produce a result that was greater than the sum of its parts. Instead of taking the Goth Metal sound, I would have tried to take some of the Goth Metal atmosphere or feeling instead. Dark, mournful atmosphere in Folk Metal is a rare thing. I think Lyriel would have benefitted from that far more than trying to be Evanescence or Lacuna Coil.

The debut album from Whoretopsy (and also for Germany’s Torture Music Records) turns out to be a pretty damn good one. These Aussie sickos dish out a healthy serving of deliciously demented guttural Death Metal, most of which is unadulterated mid-paced slamfest. Occasionally the band will kick it into high gear with over-the-top blasting brutality, while other times they slow it down to a chug-induced crawl. Storma’s vocals are standard guttural filth —a deep growl that causes involuntary bowel failure coupled with a recurring high-pitch scream that admittedly could use a little work— but he gets the job done. The real treasure here is the album’s ultra-disturbing lyrics. When the first line is, “He sits fingering his foreskin,” —a song about dressing an elderly prostitute in your deceased grandmother’s clothing and making her soil herself before you bathe, fuck, and kill her in that order— you know it’s going to be a fun ride. Straight from the troubled mind to the page, other topics include fecal stench eroticism (“DPI”), dead rodent masturbation (“Voyeurism”), necrophiliac sex slaves (“Necrobordello”), and death by chronic diarrhea (“Potty Mouth”). Needless to say, They Did Unspeakable Things is full of potential catch phrases. With any luck, all the kids will be saying, “inhaling her rich musk,” “labia and anus flayed,” “her pelvic floor is weak,” and “lick the spunk off my guts, whore” by the end of the summer. Musically Whoretopsy won’t be accused of wheel reinvention anytime soon, but when your lyric sheet makes the Marquis de Sade’s diary look like a Ron Howard script, who the fuck cares? Now lick the spunk off my guts, whore!
Note: Distributed in the U.S. by the ultra-brutal folks at Sevared Records.

This goofy fucking name reminds me of teenage days when I would get high with friends and try to think of the most ridiculous band names possible. The ones I can still remember are Person Hurter (which a group of friends in Minneapolis would actually bring to reality years later), Browned Grief, and Place of Bad Thing Happening (whose classic Death, Do Bad Thing remains one of the best nonexistent albums of all time). But unlike the acid-washed-jean Thrash or ham-fisted Grindcore we’d often envision when coming up with joke names, this poorly-monikered band from Chicago’s seventh album reeks of a different kind of joke altogether. Bible of the Devil play total Butt Rock, and they’re unashamedly dead serious about it. They have the late ’70s/early ’80s Hard Rock act nailed to a tee. Recycled-then-neutered riffs from Kiss, Thin Lizzy, early Priest, and early Maiden, a vocalist that sounds like a significantly overweight Paul Stanley, and song titles like “Raw and Order” and “I Know What Is Right (In the Night).” The production even sounds antiquated. These guys went to great lengths to pay tribute to their idols, but the pessimist in me has to wonder why. I’m not going to pretend I don’t indulge in a little Butt Rock now and then, but I’ll dust off my Destroyer cassette when I want to hear Kiss. I’ll break out my Metal Health vinyl with the 75-cent price sticker still on it if I’m feeling really frisky, and the same goes for all the other bands these guys emulate. Classics are classics because they are classics. Elementary homage to said classics does not an overnight classic make, so who is this for? Old fogies don’t buy records from newer artists (especially ones named Bible of the Devil) and young people don’t know what records are. So, I guess that leaves lovers, relatives, and the local biker bar patrons? Perhaps they hope to open for Def Leppard at a county fair someday? Or maybe since Thugs & Fools feels so much like Spinal Tap —minus the (intentionally) comedic value— they’re really big in Japan?

This is the first and only release by Denmark’s Klor to date. That being said, I’m essentially going to treat this as a demo recording. Trust me, I’m being generous to most bands when I do this. I’m old and jaded. I say that a lot and I mean it. I come from an era when a band put out demo tape after demo tape over a period of years - sometimes even decades - before securing a record deal. Their first album, the culmination of years of hard labor and paying their dues, was usually the best music they ever recorded. Now, a band’s best album is usually their seventh or eighth release. That’s usually five or six albums after I’ve ceased to give a flying shit about them. Klor isn’t an exception to this rule. To say that this album is derivative and unoriginal is probably going to get me called “Captain Obvious” again, but it’s true. Klor isn’t bringing anything new or awesome to the table. This album sounds so much like old Burzum that Varg should be getting a royalty check. Dissonant, raw Black Metal is the order of the day. Droning, repetitive, riffing and Necro production are all on display in abundant quantities. There are some interesting parts here, but again, they’re things that Burzum already did and did better. While this may be technically well done, Klor is ultimately going to end up being another faceless band in a sea of bland, unoriginal Black Metal unless they can somehow find their own sound. My guess is that it will probably be long after I’ve stopped caring about them, but you never know. They can clone Burzum well enough, but so can a thousand other bands. There is some potential there but what they really need to do is develop their own sound.

Italy has never been much of a hotbed for brutal Death Metal, so back in 2003 when I first heard Disturbance, I was blown away and quick to anoint Hour of Penance the best Italian DM band of all time. 2005’s Pageantry for Martyrs was more of the same bulldozing guttural punishment, further cementing the band’s title. However, each release since then has been increasingly less heavy (both musically and vocally) and considerably less memorable, while becoming radically more technical and somehow even speedier. Fast-forward to Sedition, several lineup changes later, and the band is barely recognizable as the same monstrous beast they once were. All Death Metal bands that hope to achieve, let alone maintain, any level of success are going to have to sound like Nile or Behemoth. I accept that, but I don’t have to like it. It’s clear that Hour of Penance subscribe to that theory, as the only moments of Sedition that aren’t constant machine gun drumming and 999 notes per second are those Egyptian/Sumerian-accentuated melodies that Nile/Behemoth have driven into the ground for a decade or so. The songs occasionally feature those sweeping fills (have I mentioned Behemoth?) and the high-precision start/stop breakdowns that Krisiun have made so commonplace, but good luck telling any of them apart. Replacing departed vocalist Francesco Paoli who jumped ship for Fleshgod Apocalypse, new singer Paolo Pieri (Aborym, Malfeitor) does his best… you guessed it… Nergal impression. Phrasing his rapid-fire vocal vomit as best he can to the rapid-fire musical blur behind him, he isn’t the problem. The reason Sedition fails is because it contains no actual songs. For all its impressive technical prowess and inhuman speed, it doesn’t lend itself to one memorable second.

Not enough people are aware of how truly awesome Sweden’s In Mourning is. A Melodeath band that never sounds contrived, with one of the most underrated singers in the scene today. The non-poser elite amongst you will remember Tobias Netzell from his one-off gig as October Tide’s vocalist for their 2010 masterpiece, A Thin Shell (and he didn’t even get to show off his all-pro clean vocals on that one). These guys play melodic Death Metal the way you wish all bands would. The melody never robs the music of its strength, the strength never robs the melody of its misery, and they not only know when to plunge into Doomy depths but have also figured out how to inject small doses of Prog without turning everything into some Mike and the Mechanics nightmare. After two nearly flawless bodies of work (2008’s Shrouded Divine and 2010’s Monolith), the band does not disappoint on The Weight of Oceans. A nautically-themed concept album —boy, that sure has become a trendy move of late, but that’s about the meanest thing I have to say here— chock-full of moody epics that never abandon the listener’s interest. In Mourning commands any tempo and wield suicidal melody effortlessly at will. Listen to how seamlessly they transition the galloping chug of the verses to the dejected misery of the chorus on “A Vow to Conquer the Ocean.” Even when blasting at full speed, they never lose sight of their perfected majestic gloom (see the ending of “From a Tidal Sleep”), and when they feel like weaving a clean vocal ballad (“Celestial Tear”), the entrancing results are undeviating. At about 2:30 on “Convergence,” the band drop one of their patented Doom bombs from out of nowhere that leaves you completely mesmerized, only to navigate back to the original pace without missing a beat. I could go on and on, but just buy or steal this fucking thing already! Discover Sweden’s best kept secret for yourself.

I vomit my intestines out every time I see the word “supergroup” used to describe this puzzling assembly of irrelevant faggots. Now, please understand, I in no way ever intended to call legendary sticksman Vinny Appice (Black Sabbath, Dio, Heaven and Hell) a faggot, but being in a band with such third-tier, pillow-biting ass clowns makes you at least bi. For some reason he thought it would be a good idea to team up with Rex Brown, ex-“bassist” for the gayest group of posers in the history of Glam faggotry. He also convinced one of the guys from Ratt to quit his job at the Drive & Shine to play guitar, and recruited the vocalist from perennial Tough-Guy Metal failures Pissing Razors. What, the guys in Hanson were all busy sucking Fred Durst’s dick for blow? Bad moves all, Vin. That’s like getting Fred Savage to play Spartacus. What they create musically is often reminiscent of Alice in Chains… if Alice in Chains had been talentless hacks that wrote non-threatening Radio Rock by the numbers for trailer park forty-somethings. This type of PG-13 Metal will inevitably be a huge hit with the sub-35 IQ crowd, but anyone reading this website will want to avoid this like a random encounter with Mormons. Kill Devil Hill are about as Metal as a Richard Simmons workout video, however, if your idea of heavy lies somewhere between the Rocky IV soundtrack and the first Silverchair album, then this will sound great coming through the car speakers on the drive home from church. If it weren’t for the mostly undeserved fame of the parties involved, this is the type of band you’d see opening up for Crazy Town at bingo halls in the rural South.