No Balls-Problems That Will Solve Themselves EP (2004[?)

"Yeah, well, life's strange."-Slim Charles, The Wire, season 4

Swedish noise is always a good choice when you wake up with a head full of booze, an empty wallet, and a pile of work you don't have the energy to do. Because really, what's more cathartic than pressing your ears up to the stereo and letting these Scandi slugs blast your sensory perceptions to smithereens with a few slices of carefully (sloppily) conceived torment?

Nothing. Nothing at all. No Balls is an on-again-off-again side project of the legendary, also on-again-off-again Brainbombs. Same personnel, mostly the same sound, so really the two projects complement each other. The sound is slightly different: there's a bit more rhythmic propulsion on this EP than your typical 'Bombs slab 'o' vinyl. But this amped up energy doesn't lead anywhere, of course, except further down into the black pit that is your tormented psyche. "Black Nerve" goes in an undulating circle, a circle not as harsh as a 'Bombs circle, but still pretty abrasive. "Countdown to Kill" features a guitar riff worthy of Kurt Cobain's golden days, but there's no catharsis, just monotonous repetition. Fuck teen spirit when you've got black tar heroin and Mad Dog, right?

I AM THE SLAYER.

P.S.-I'll get back to regular posting, and posting new stuffs, once I finish teaching this godawful summer class. Yeah, who'da thunk it? This Drug Punk has been charged with educating the youth. Joke's on them, eh?

Flesh Lite-demo CS (2013)

It's a safe bet that the Flesh Lite guys spend a lot of time doing bong rips and throwing beer cans at each other in someone's parents' basement in suburban Winnipeg. While blasting "Bleach" and Big Black at unhealthy volumes. Their demo finds Flesh Lite deploying the full panoply of blunt instruments to clobber the listener into numb acquiescence: bricks, clubs, baseball bats, even mattocks!

"Bed Bore" is a slow-building wrecker that just gurgles a savage, shaggy riff over and over again as the singer, Bret, gurgle-burbles something that may or may not be English. "Phlegm" falls somewhere between Nirvana's sludgiest efforts and outright noise: if I was a Hessian I could totally headbang to this tune, but it's a bit too clever in a knuckle-dragging sorta way to be anything truly metal(lic). Mid-way through, a stray note of clean guitar wafts out from under the resin-encrusted wreckage, only to quickly submerge in a shower of distortion. "Fresh Baggage" strays dangerously close to "well-written song" territory, but veers away again for more burbleburblepisshiss crunching noise. I spent a lot of my youth drinking bad beer and listening to Nirvana, and if that activity is part of your past, present, or sounds like a fun idea, you'll probably dig Flesh Lite.

Get into these neanderthals here.

*p.s.-I've been told that there's at least one straight edge member of Flesh Lite, so apparently pepsi cans are involved in the can-throwing contest. Regardless, these guys are fun as hell.*

Dreamdecay-Fern EP (2012)

Seattle's Dreamdecay stumbles, lurches, and crashes through five tracks of carefully-constructed-so-that-it-sounds-clumsy noise rock on "Fern." The whole thing sounds like one long nightmare, in the form of a sustained fight between the drums and guitar. Occasionally the singer gurgles out some sub-lingual background burble but mostly it's just the cymbals dive-bombing over the guitar, which responds with staccato, savage bursts of feedback. Sometimes the bass is audible, sometimes not yet this is a lot more coherent than most noise rock that crosses my desk. It's mathy noise, or noisy mathrock. Perfect for when you're in the mood for Billy Bao but can't deal with something quite that shrill.

Listen to "Fern" here, and check Dreamdecay's blog for tour dates, etc. They're playing Total Fest with Walls in August, which should be rad.

Lebenden Toten-Cataleptic Noise Contamination CS (2008)

The Fourth of July is one of the few annual occasions upon which I will post things political on Drug Punk-for my problems with the genre of anarchopunk, read this. I'm not fetishizing apolitical apathy, but rather tacitly acknowledging the inherent silliness of protest music. Anyway, enough blabbling; last year it was Tragedy's best record ever, this year it's a 2008 tour cassette from Portland's finest.

The tracks on here are nothing radically different from previous and future LT releases: savagely distorted dbeat misery, with contorted, frantic drumming and guitar that sounds like electrodes sparking just before they hit yr neuron receptors. Noise punk has been trendy lately, but Lebenden Toten is the only band that can hold their own against the originators of the genre like Disorder, Confuse, Gism et. al.: the band is incredibly tight (playing this fast is an art form unto itself), and there's nothing superfluous in any of the songs. Chanel's lyrics cover a variety of topics, but can be summed up pithily: late capitalist society is a cancerous body too atrophied to kill itself, and instead keeps itself going on the productive energies of us all. We built it, why don't we destroy it?

So throw this on, and melt yr brain on fireworks or distortiontildeafness, it's yr choice. I'm reblogging this from Robert's most excellent blog, Terminal Escape.