Scum Guilt - Scum Guilt - 2012

What's a filthy mess, lasts three minutes but can take hours to penetrate? Yes, an encounter I had freshman year of college with a Greek girl but also, for this blog's purposes, Scum Guilt's eponymous EP.  This unholy amalgamation of factions of my beloved Buckeye metal masters, Dismemberment and Kingsblood, vomit a heap of grind in three violent retches, each serving spewing forth at roughly the same tempo, structure, and preceded and followed by feedback. It's the tiny chunks here that distinguish one sonic heap from another and reward the careful listener: the solitary clean chord struck five seconds before the end of "Ignorance," the drumsticks counting off two seconds into "Filth" and its ramshackle skeleton of a riff, or the presence of actual discernible percussion in the record's 67-second epic, "Fronter." Not for the weak of heart nor anyone desiring melody, this is grindcore cut to the bone, pulverized, marrow sucked clean, regurgitated and fucking reanimated. If this is your thing in any way, the rehearsal demos available are definitely worth grabbing, too. I have to be honest and say I have no idea if these are the same tracks or not but sonically they tilt much more toward the percussion and provide an entirely different experience. Both are available at whatever price you think is fair at Scum Guilt's bandcamp site. Be generous but be forewarned: they may just make more.

Black Sunday: Metallica - "So What (Live)" b/w "Through the Never (Live)" (2012)

I'm not usually one to pick up Metal Hammer's special editions. As an expensive import title, the regular magazine alone is a budget buster but I felt compelled to grab their Metallica 30th Anniversary Event special when Barnes & Noble had it on the shelf for $14.99, easily ten dollars less than I have seen the same issue for sale in independent record stores. Like many ages-old Metallica fans, I have mixed feelings about the current band and their recent output but I cannot deny that the four-night series of 30th Anniversary concerts from late in 2011 at the Fillmore Theatre in San Francisco is something I would have given about anything to attend. Until their marketing machine releases the inevitable DVD/CD collection of the whole affair, this package, complete with a massive Metallica-drenched magazine and an exclusive 45, is a pretty neat set.

The wax itself is a nice enough 7". "So What," from the December 9 show, features progenitor Animal from the Anti-Nowhere League and flipside "Through the Never," originally on Metallica, is culled from the December 10 set. The sleeve itself is heavy cardstock similar to that that envelops the entire package. The vinyl has a UK-style breakout center and song titles etched into the run-off matrices.

The record is supposed to be the extra here, second to the magazine, and feels as such. The magazine itself, a collaboration between Metal Hammer and Metallica's So What! fan club publication, is magnificent, weighing in at 130 largely fluff-free pages. This publication rivals many tour programmes and is packed with photos, interviews, timelines and set lists from the entire week of the concerts. It's literally several hours' worth of reading, cover to cover, and, even for the Metalli-jaded such as myself, compelling stuff.

All in all, a really nice package, no piece alone necessarily worth the inflated prices I've seen; but as a set - especially at fifteen bucks - one of the neatest souvenirs you can find from an event most of us never got to experience.

Transparent Vinyl: Pressing Gogmagogical Records

So all of this is still happening. Little by little and more slowly than I would like (an upside of slowly is that it is currently synonymous with less financially demanding), but happening nonetheless. There's not a lot of fun DIY-type stuff I am able to share yet but I am amassing things that may prove interesting if and when this gets off the ground properly. In the meantime, feel free to peek, warts and all, at the awkwardly growing http://gogmagogicalrecords.com/ (also now resident at the menu bar above as a separately-linked page - we're still really, really embryonic with a lot of demo/trial/placeholder material). This is truly a labor of love with the initial band in my sights yet-to-be-named while we sort through the details and all sorts of kind compatriots from this informal metal network overwhelming me with their generosity and expertise. Mack Sabbath at Rockthought is kindly assisting with web design and layout, The Metal Advisor is living up to his moniker and doing exactly that: providing invaluable insight, assistance and feedback throughout and, for my most weighty, favorite milestone yet, R. Lawrence Blake from The NWOTM Blog has hewn a monolith of a logo which is, simply, badass. That's a good place to stop for now and one hell of a start.

This is PiL - Public Image Ltd - 2012

This is PiL, Public Image Ltd's first record in two decades, comes across somewhat as a reboot/reintroduction and skronks onto the stereo in a cacophony of croaked vocals, kazoos and a handful of repeated phrases wailed as only John Lydon can across its eponymous first track. The number settles into an Eastern-flavored groove and, over the course of a minute or two, the years wash away and one begins to wonder just how "post" post-punk can get. Indeed, This is PiL seems to traverse an ellipse, circling backward, angling across PiL's own evolution with three Happy?-era vets seemingly orbiting very closely to First Issue and Metal Box/Second Edition.