POTEMKIN

 

A little over two years ago I posted Sludge Vol.2 and I said this:

You ever wake up feeling....ugly? I'm not talking about "not feeling yourself" ugly, I'm thinking something more like "willing to destroy yourself" ugly. You refuse to look in the mirror - not because you're scared of what you might see, but because you know what's going to be staring at you. And it's disgusting. You ever wake up feeling....hopeless? I'm not talking about "should have slept in today" hopeless, I'm thinking something more like "hopeless" hopeless. You refuse to see the light - not because you're stubborn, but because you know it's not there. You ever wish those feelings had a soundtrack? You ever wish those days had a soundtrack? Enter: POTEMKIN. Terrifyingly misanthropic sludge that understands your desperation and sees you for the ugly piece of shit you know you are. And sometimes...it feels good to feel seen. 

Well, it should come as no surprise that the same sentiment applies to the first volume. This shit is just so disgustingly honest and brutal. When people search for this band's music, results should come with trigger warnings....and this is why we keep listening: so we can feel. 

SLUDGE VOL.1

VOIMATON

 

Maybe I should have dropped this on the live blog, even though most of y'all skip that one completely (your loss). Because it's live, I should...but because I had never heard (or heard of) VOIMATON before I snagged a party pack of dead stop metal tapes a few months ago and I suspect most of you haven't heard (or heard of) them either I dropped it right here. In your lap. So you can let the downtuned death/doom cover and smother you. You're welcome. 

LIVEWIRE LOUNGE 2019

CADAVERIBUS

 

Was drawn to the cover initially (for obvious reasons), but when I opened the case and saw "Cadaveribus is a new Death/Doom band from Tokyo, Japan" printed on the inside of the j-card under the track listing....? I was helpless. So I took this four song cassette home and popped it in the deck and I get exactly what I was hoping for - filthy guttural primal death metal stomps layered with stench and doom. The four tracks here are painfully restrained, the vocals are disgusting growls and the guitars redefine disgust itself. "Demonic" is the most melodic cut, anchored by a guitar break around the 2:30 mark that will break hearts, but the individual "moments" are simply too many to count (though you would be advised to prepare yourself for the moment when the tempo picks up in "Eternity" because.....oooff, motherfukkr). A truly devastating release - exactly what I was looking for and exactly what I wanted but even better than I expected. 

OPEN THE GATE

SURAM

 

Four slabs of lo-fi bluesy stoner doom with some of the most desperate vocals you will hear this week. While the first sentence does a pretty good job of summing up Tanpa Kepastian, I feel it's worth noting how much the raw production and delivery adds to SURAM's appeal. Some bands rely on production, some bands don't need the production and still benefit from it. SURAM exist outside of it and the shit is filthy. "Alam Liar" is the choice cut - creating a space for themselves somewhere between BLUE CHEER and DOPETHRONE. You can try to figure out how they pull that off if you like, I'll just be here jamming. 

TANPA KEPASTIAN

SURAM

 

The title of this release is 2 Songs Slowly Crust and if you can't figure out what Jakarta's SURAM are all about based on that descriptor then there might not be much I can do for you here. What the title doesn't tell you is how painfully raw their brand of slowly crust is, or how desperate and weirdly anxious this slowly crust makes me feel when I listen to it. I've got a few more SURAM tapes waiting in the wings but I wanted to start with this one because it kinda hurts and life is pain, suckers.

2 SONGS SLOWLY CRUST

ABYSSAL

 

Another release, another song, another forty plus minutes of sonic destruction from ABYSSAL It's easy to say that doom is just about the feeling, but listen to ABYSSAL and you'll hear what happens when a band can capture that feeling and write a song and not just a collection of riffs and tones. I fukkn love this band. 

MISANTHROPE

ABYSSAL

 

Doom is hard y'all. And when you're setting up in a sweltering warehouse to play for a cowd of maybe half a dozen people...? Doom gets real real hard. That was the scenario facing Tijuana's ABYSSAL afew weeks ago in Fresno, and I was one of the "maybe half a dozen" in attendance. They got their shit dialed in and calmly announced 'We're going to play one long song for you" and then embarked on an absolutely epic journey of sound. You could hear a pin drop in that warehouse during the introduction...and then came the tonnage. This is the hard part - because doom is (to a large extent a formula) and the audience often knows what's coming, the artist needs to surprise the listener with the how more than the what. And when ABYSSAL got heavy that night, we weren't surprised as much as we were completely blown away. It was hot, the room was awkward, and the band was mesmerizing....doom might be hard, but that night it was as if there was nothing else in this world more important than doom. It was perfect, and listening to A Deep Sea Funeral will always take me back there. 

A DEEP SEA FUNERAL

POTEMKIN

 

You ever wake up feeling....ugly? I'm not talking about "not feeling yourself" ugly, I'm thinking something more like "willing to destroy yourself" ugly. You refuse to look in the mirror - not because you're scared of what you might see, but because you know what's going to be staring at you. And it's disgusting. You ever wake up feeling....hopeless? I'm not talking about "should have slept in today" hopeless, I'm thinking something more like "hopeless" hopeless. You refuse to see the light - not because you're stubborn, but because you know it's not there. You ever wish those feelings had a soundtrack? You ever wish those days had a soundtrack? Enter: POTEMKIN. Terrifyingly misanthropic sludge that understands your desperation and sees you for the ugly piece of shit you know you are. And sometimes...it feels good to feel seen. 

SLUDGE VOL.2

TUSKS OF BLOOD

 

This one comes from deep in the Satan's Pimp archive - a dreary stoner violence slog from turn of the century Portland that sounds like it was ripped from the clutches of hell herself. It's easy to imagine these sounds coming from those lost decades....but think about them now. That's the point. The now. 

TUSKS OF BLOOD

BODY COP

 

This was one of the first "current" tapes I shared in the early days of Terminal Escape. I revisited the band recently and....damn does it still hit. Noise drenched downtuned sludge dirges with vocals that sound like they've....like they've just given up. And this tape was all we got. 

BODY COP

SIBERIAN ASS TORTURE // CRACK

 

This offering from CRACK is a bleak pseudo-psychedelic foray into murky doom. Cavernous experimentation meets deliberate bombast throughout five tracks spanning a full half hour, with spacious vocals that act more as an instrument of noise than a messenger. To be clear, the cuts are raw...and that only adds to the impact. The return of SIBERIAN ASS TORTURE on the flip is in some ways more of the same, but kicked up a notch in all departments. Those vocals are replaced by a guitar that just wails filthy leads and the tempo overall shifts up to a steady slog. Think about the most primitive PHARAOH OVERLORD sounds with a few stoner riffs...recorded in the barn next door. Neither band is doing anything 'cool,' or anything that folks in the various punk sub-scenes give half a shit about - which is, of course, exactly what makes this tape so fucking great. 

SIBERIAN ASS TORTURE / CRACK

REINA AVEJA

 

The REINA AVEJA trip from Florida to California blew a lot of minds in 1998. They just casually laid waste to every band they played with...heaviness that came from another world delivered by women who came from the other side of this one. The approach to sludge-laden slogs was punk, which brought justifiable BUZZOV•EN comparisons, but the approach to punk was fierce and femme in the face of those comparisons. They recorded an album with Billy Anderson while they were out here, an album that has (unfortunately) never seen the light of day, and the band spread out shortly afterwards. The bassist spent has been in several bands since, and is currently in a freak punk outfit called GRP.TXT. I spent a couple of years in LAUDANUM with the drummer and her partner before I moved to Wisconsin...making noise with them was really fukkn fun. Anyway...someone should release that record Billy recorded. 

ROYAL JELLY

RIPPING STARS FROM THE SKY

Sometimes it just hits you. And it can be brutally simple but you're floored. Slack-jawed. You have to put everything down and really listen to RIPPING STARS FROM THE SKY for it to have that effect, and I don't just mean that you have to empty your arms....you have to unburden yourself. The tape will do the rest. It's raw, distant, desperate, willing. Mostly instrumental lo-fi doom driven by keyboards. Picture BOHREN & DER CLUB OF GORE, Italy's MISANTHROPUS and CASIO TONES FOR THE PAINFULLY ALONE....transcribed onto the same page and then crumpled up into a ball. 

RIPPING STARS FROM THE SKY

 

GREYLAND

 

Aside from appearances on a few (extremely sick) flyers from the late 1990s and an Albany, NY return address, I don't have much background to share. Truly a product of the decade, GREYLAND's brand of DIY stoner/crust falls in line with RINGWORM (or RINGWURM), BUZZOV•EN, even some of the metallic stench that bands like DAMAD cranked out earlier in the decade. But seeing their name on flyers with SPAZZ, MONSTER X, PAINDRIVER, DEVOID OF FAITH and the like, you know these mutants were dropping bombs in hardcore spaces and that just makes it feel so much heavier. Guitars are just a touch off in a gloriously nauseating way, the entire recording is redlined, they just sound awful. "Awful" as in...ugly...and then they grind. Repeated listens over the past few days have only drawn me in closer - pure and ruthless US hardcore stench, and I love it. 

GREYLAND

Listen to "Hate Inheritance." Seriously. 

CAT CEREBRATIONS

This collection of raw (mostly) instrumental psychedelic dirges settles in like a new piece of furniture...you walk by it a few times and then it's just there. Like it always has been. Recorded and presented by Chris Cat Food (OXYGEN DESTROYER, SIBERIAN ASS TORTURE, GEORGE CRUSTANZA), the ten artists here sound suspiciously similar while they dance between PHARAOH OVERLORD style numbing repetition (NO, COMADRE!) and pure repetitive bombast (CRUST KAPPA RAMPAGE). The recordings are uniform, so that when the tape does break loose as on the brilliantly monotonous "Rush To Death" by DIABLO CON CARNE it fits in perfectly and still listens like rehearsal doom. A filthy rocking session with damaged guitars from RACCON COMPLEX CONTAGION,  a fifteen minute exercise in patience from MOUNTAINOUS CRUNCHMENT, a short West Bay worthy bass/drum assault from CLANDESTINE BRONTOSAURUS...you almost get the impression that someone's having a little fun at your expense. But honestly, by the time I get to "Wizard Dream" by TLC WATERFALLS, I don't really care if this is a joke or not.

猫の大脳作用

(CEREBRAL ACTION OF CATS)

MOLOCH

There was a time when I reached for this genre (and honestly, this band) with some frequency. For whatever reason my ears started turning towards the kids in the '10s, and I feel like doom is primarily a second wave thing - your first band doesn't play oppressive doom, it's the later bands...after you've become rightly disillusioned. But still, the familiar riff that starts "Who Is This Who Is Coming" makes the chills come, and slowly the intensity and despair cloud the rest of the experience. Eight songs, averaging around six minutes apiece, with a devastating RORSCHACH cover to close things out. MOLOCH's catalog is much celebrated, but I confess that I always reach back. 

MOLOCH

LUNAR TIDES

A crushing and powerful 40+ minute offering from one half of LIŁITH. Heather's approach to soundscape is enveloping and fills every crevice with a sonic haze - electronics mingle with manufacture sounds and lament filled howls to become one pure expression. LUNAR TIDES is not to be experienced casually, and I share it today as an opportunity to cleanse your aural palate and your consciousness. 

ABRACADABRA

FRIENDSHIP

Japan's FRIENDSHIP are the very embodiment of brutality - doom/sludge production adding monumental tonnage to an assault that is pure and violent grind.  Check "Compton" for FRIENDSHIP's bizarre approach to blasting a hole in your skull - non stop pummeling that drags doom riffing through the darkness. Their debut full length, 2017's Hatred, has already been recognized (and scooped up) by Southern Lord and Sentient Ruin, but it seems criminal to let something like this pass by simply because someone else "discovered" it first....I mean, sometimes the 'other' people have pretty good ears.

HATRED

SHOOTING GUNS

Canadian instrumental space/psych kings with a 2014 cassette only offering for the Dub Ditch Picnic label. I came across their debut Born To Deal In Magic: 1952-1976 some years ago, and still take occasional dips into their swirling monotony from another time, but Street Rock reminded me just how much SHOOTING GUNS there was for me to sink into (including a recent foray into composing and perfoming film scores). If "Feelings (dub)" doesn't lure/lull you into submission, then edge the volume up for the raw bombast of "I Think I Can Taste It" as the closing statement of this masterpiece and feel yourself drift away. Taking cues from SLEEP, LOW, WOODEN SHJIPS, this band takes ownership of the sound and makes you simultaneously feel and forget everything. 

STREET ROCK

SPEEDWITCHES

A killer two song dose of stoned psychedelic biker jams from Malaysia's SPEEDWITCHES. The fuzzed out guitar has me hooked before the riffs even sink in, a dirty maxed out single track attack that brings to mind Japanese classics like BLUES CREATION. They take their time developing structures (two tracks here span over 20 minutes), meandering along the way for solos and hallucinations to remind you that the journey is absolutely the most important part of the journey. More listens only bring more comparisons that span decades and continents, which leads me to believe that SPEEDWITCHES are perhaps without time and/or space....just floating on the rock with no destination other than rock 'n roll. 

You can certainly call this stoner rock if you are so inclined, and it's obvious that SPEEDWITCHES are well versed in the SABBATH, SLEEP, KYUSS school. But the psychedelic end of the heavy spectrum represented in these tracks is what really sets them apart. They aren't aping any of the shamelessly retro bell bottom doom bands, they sound like they are actually from another time and another place. See above comment: more listens.

SPEEDWITCHES