Black Sunday: Acid Witch - Stoned (2010)

There's fun and then there's serious fun. Acid Witch fall squarely into the former and, hell, there's nothing wrong with that. Scouring the photo inside the gatefold of 2010's Stoned, one can easily discern if this disc is for them. The Gate? Check. Hellhammer? Check. The Necronomicon? Check. A VHS of Sleepaway Camp II? Check and sold. It was an easy purchase, then, when Hell's Headbangers offered the third pressing of the band's second full-length record, this time available in what was described as "Halloween Orange and Deep Purple." The end result looks a lot more red than purple to me but, frankly, who the hell cares?

Acid Witch offer an almost satirical, very stereotypical stoner experience and one that, taken on the music alone, does not offer as much staying power as one would hope given their over-the-top, easy to love image. As a physical package, however, Stoned delivers in spades with a beautiful gatefold package, massive artwork from the band's own Shagrat duplicated on an 18x24" poster, die-cut Halloween window decor and the aforementioned two-toned wax.

Stoned is fun to look at and even better to pore over as the record plays. It's a great soundtrack for all your B-grade horror hankerings and can land in your hands for fifteen bucks. Hell's Headbangers offer a huge selection, superb prices, fast delivery and very interesting material on their own label. With over 8,000 titles in stock and only three so far on my shelf, I've got some ordering to do.

Transparent Vinyl: [your band here]

Wanna make a tremendous sound on a little record? Contact me at gogmagogical@gmail.com or Gogmagogical Records, PO Box 211, Vandalia OH 45377. Click the "Read more>>" below for a template of what I propose as the standard artist agreement for a one-off 7" record.

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.