Friday 3 November 2017

SxFxCx/Bestial Vomit - split 7"

Smelling Fetid Corpse: Not a shitty Goregrind band like the name would suggest, two piece Grindcore project from Lima, Peru with a girl on vocals and a guy playing everything else.
Bestial Vomit: Grindcore from Bastardo, Italy, which I was surprised to find out is a real place.  They've recently been on an epic tour month Euro tour (which is just wrapping up at the time I'm posting this), I've managed to catch them in London and Eindhoven, weirdly they were promoted at both shows as being from Peru.  Two reasons I could see why; 1) there's a Black Metal band from Lima with the same name who unlike the Italian band have a presence on Facebook, so when promoters are looking for information to put on their event page they are lazily putting the band name in the search bar and just coming up with the other band 2) the band themselves are pretending they're the Black Metal band just to fuck with people, both of which are entirely plausible.



















Friday 13 October 2017

Mister Lizard pre-7" material

Weird mix of Powerviolence and Noise Rock, based in London but most of the members come from different places, I know the drummer is from Gravesend in my home county of Kent and also plays in Noise Rock/Post-Hardcore band Screen Wives.  When I made an attempt at a UK scene report post a couple months back I noticed that their bandcamp had gone down and you could only pay to order/download a digital copy of their new 7", here's three things that you used to be able to get for pay what you want from their bandcamp that they took down for some reason, I'm not going to bother puting them up in separate links as it's not a massively huge zip file.



Friday 6 October 2017

Sytematic Death - Systema-Ten one sided 12"

Raging Hardcore from Tokyo sounding better than any reformed band from the 80's down to two original members has any right to be.  The other side has an awesome screen printed painting of a demon.

Friday 22 September 2017

Bloody Phoenix/Lycanthrophy/Skunk/Disturbance Project - 4 way split LP

Bloody Phoenix: Grindcore from Los Angeles, California featuring members of Excruciating Terror 
Lycanthrophy: Powerviolence from Žďár nad Sázavou and Poděbrady, Czech Republic, members also play in Needful Things
Skunk: Crustgrind from Winnipeg, Canada
Disturbance Project: Grindcore from Madrid, Spain

Friday 15 September 2017

Märesvin - Retarded tape

Three piece Powerviolence from K-Town, the singer also plays drums in a really great Grindcore band called Kluster Fuck, you should check them out too.

Friday 8 September 2017

Government Flu - Singles Collection LP

80's style Hardcore from Warsaw.  One of the few Polish bands who sing in English which helps set them apart (sorry Poles, as much as I love Post Regiment a lot of your HC bands sound really samey to me).  This release compiles the tracks from their demo, the songs from the Warsaw Is Burning 7" comp and their first two EPs, they do have a Bandcamp with all of their release up for pay what you want but only have the demo and not the tracks from the three following releases to download.

Friday 1 September 2017

Los Revolucionarios - Truman Show tape

Remember when I used to just write a short description of a band instead of a whole fucking essay?  Those were good times, goooood times......anyway, this is a Neocrust band from Saltillo, Mexico.

Friday 25 August 2017

Art Of Burning Water/Famine - split 7" and some loose thoughts on the current UK scene

This was penciled in to come out last year (if you remember the last time I wrote about this band), but instead they released an LP, a split tape with Containment from London, a split 7" with Nothing Clean from Leicester (a band a highly recommend if you miss Gets Worse and want to hear a UK band do Powerviolence the way it should fucking sound) and a remix tape, all in the past year, I've compared them to Melvins, not just they are the most obvious influence but because they also try to emulate their insane release schedule.

Unfortunately they've been forced to cancel all of their shows this Summer due to vocalist/guitarist Grief getting injured before they were supposed to play Supersonic festival in Birmingham.  I was disappointed to hear about that as they don't seem (or at least rarely) play outside of London and playing a festival like that is the kind of recognition they really deserve, of any genre I think of them as one of the best live UK bands active right now.  I encourage everyone to buy their records, not to offset any medical costs (thankfully this is still a country where healthcare is considered a human right) but because they're a solid band who deserve all the support they get.

Famine are a three piece Grindcore band from Leeds who sprang from the family tree of bands coming from The Afternoon Gentlemen.  While I'm thinking about current bands from Leeds, I also want to recommend Lugubrious Children, three piece Powerviolence band who've just done a tour of USA (more and more of our DIY bands seem to be doing that, Endless Swarm, Powerviolence from Edinburgh, Dawn Ray'd Blackened Crust from Liverpool from the ashes of We Came Out Like Tigers, at the time of writing Mister Lizard, arty Powerviolence from London have just finished roaming the States...what was I talking about, oh yeah, bands from Leeds) and Hex, gender balanced Thrash/PV.

Friday 18 August 2017

Agathocles ‎– Total Fucking Chimpoggerthocles • Live At Chimpyfest 2016 tape or: the time Mincecore pioneers got too drunk to play or be trusted with microphones

Sorry again for the long silence, I've been busy doing grown up things like working a full time job to keep the roof over my head in the house I moved into earlier this year, but I did pick up some things at this year's Obscene Extreme and Chimpyfest to keep doing posts until October at least.

Speaking of Chimpyfest, I've been taking pictures at DIY fests since last year and I actually have quite a few from the performance this was recorded at, I thought I'd narrate with what I remember.

Day 2 of Chimpyfest 2016 ended on a high, Tools Of The Trade from Malaysia and Looking For An Answer from Spain fucking smashed it for joint best performances of the fest, but then......then Agathocles stumbled onstage.  Obviously drunk they began soundchecking (the first 15 minutes of side I is just soundcheck), the guitarist had stripped down to his boxers, Jan had seemed to handover bass responsibilities to someone else (I've heard they're a member of the Dutch band, Pancreatic Purulence who played earlier that day but I'm not sure if that's right).  When they were finally ready Jan was nowhere to be seen, so the drummer took a mic asked where he was then threw it on the ground, which fucked off the soundguys at T.Chances.  The white guy with a ponytail (don't know his name, sorry) rushed up to the stage, asked the drummer why they were being disrespectful to their equipment, which was just brushed off (the two guys who do sound at T.Chances are good people who do a better job than you'd expect at a dive Punk venue, but DON'T EVER FUCK WITH THEIR EQUIPMENT), Jan finally showed up, in a denim jacket with no shirt and a headband, giving the appearance of Hank Von Helvete from Turbonegro if he somehow managed to let himself go even further, stammered "sorry we're all drunk, we'll try to play some D-Beat."

They were a fucking mess



They only had audible vocals for the first few songs as Bev, the other soundman at T.Chances began confiscating mics and leads as a punitive measure for throwing one on the ground before they started. 



Then Jan tried singing without a microphone (if you've ever seen the documentary Another State Of Mind, it was like the scene when the tour got to Baltimore and the sound men freaked out and took the microphones away from Minor Threat so Ian just started to lead the crowd in a giant sing along, but much less inspiring). 













Tutek who does Lost Data Productions gave Jan, I think one of his smaller cameras to pretend it was a mic.



Then Jan went for a ride.










Did I mention they were all very drunk?  They were very drunk.





Eventually someone found a mic and a lead Bev had missed, just in time for Jan to have a touching duet with the Guitarist from the Polish band Deterrence.








The drummer decided it was sleepy time so he got swapped out for the girl from the Mexican band Nephyla.




Then, whatever the fuck this was supposed to be happened.




Aaaaand this is when my camera ran out of batteries, the guitarist handed over to the guy from Deterrence and Bev the soundman took over bass, because why the fuck not by this stage.  The whole thing ended in this weird jam session with no member of Agathocles actually onstage.  The Chimpyfest crew conspired with Grindfather Productions to release this tape with fest pre-order tickets for this year's edition.  There was a picture floating around Facebook of two members of the band passed out on the staircase of the hostel they were staying in.

[If someone could put a link to it in the comments I'll edit this post and put it here]

A lot of these pictures I took wound up in the liner notes for this tape, which is fine, just would have been nice to be credited is all.