REVIEW: Drudkh ‘A Handful of Stars’ (Season of Mist)

While their politics may be forever enshrouded in the murky fog rolling down off the Carpathians, the actual sonics of Ukrainian atmospheric black metal hermits Drudkh have gained considerable clarity and focus over the last couple of releases, and the hype has undeniably grown with them. There’s a lightness of touch to ‘A Handful of Stars’, moreso than the breakthrough, magazine-moistening ‘Microcosmos’, and simplicity to the interplay between harsh, strained, typically black metal exhortations and emotive, earth mother instrumentals which sees the band bob gently into a vague orbit in the overpopulated, debris-cluttered airspace between post-metal and post-crust, the guitar lines that open ‘Twilight Aureole’ having more than a twinge of Swedish progressive metal chestpounders Burst about them, while the weeping guitar that close ‘The Day Will Come’ seem liberated from one of those dad-friendly ‘driving song’ compilations with a bad ass rig on cover.

Were this any other band than one so stubbornly committed to reclusive cave-dwelling mysticism, it’d be an obvious plea for commercial success - the beefier production, the more accessible melodies lacking the density and primal thunder of, say, 2004’s ‘Autumn Aurora’, are easily the meandering, woodland equivalent of Anaal Nathrakh’s exchange of bowel-loosening, grime-caked terror for more moshpit-friendly party hits. But the crucial difference is that Anaal Nathrakh made their transition without losing their might, and somewhere in the recording process, Drudkh’s once formidable elemental fury that threatened to swallow up the listener like an angry forest with a big angry mouth, has been considerably diminished. ‘A Handful of Stars’ is a fine place for a picnic, the view is chocolate box lovely and the thorns have been cleared from the path, but it makes for an underwhelming full-length when set aside landmarks from their potent past.

REVIEW: Al-Thawra ‘Edifice’ (Subaltern)

Globalisation, that old bugbear of the vomit-caked

shirking classes that make up the crust punk underground, has painted every double-arch in gold leaf and sold the idea of primo latte frappucinos to people who don’t even have running water, but perversely, it’s brought us ‘Edifice’, a lo-fi nugget of such profoundly sincere spirituality and vision, caked in rage that’s open-wound sore and informed by the world’s relentless blitzkrieg of injustice. Globalisation brought together caustic, doom-fired d-beat, born in England and perfected in Sweden, the teachings of Muhammad and the teachings of Marx, traditional Arabic instruments and a hard-touring quartet from Chicago, and stewed them in purpose. Where the band’s debut, ‘Who Benefits From War?’ was untutored savagery, ‘Edifice’ is an immersive sonic whole, dragging you slowly down into a warm bubble bath of hypnotic, swirling instrumentals and rhythmic barking, driving crust riffs and dubstep bass fuzz like Anti-Sect’s unintentional ‘two-track’ rock opera ‘In Darkness There Is No Choice’.

Beyond the music, Al Thawra, one of the original disciples of Taqwacore, are providing this scene’s arteries with a throbbing adrenaline shot of individuality, not a trite strip-minding of some ’exotic’ belly dancing melodies, but an organic sum total of this quartet’s multicultural identity, the atypical and the typical. In a genre, which despite its pretentious to dissent and inclusivity is still defined by its WASP archetype, its empty cage-rattling to a set of prescribed first world white middle class problems, Al Thawra are a reminder of how much clout punk still has in its dual service to challenge and empower.

COMMENT: Insane in the Ukraine, in defence of Drudkh

The press officer (and respected metal journo in his own right, which is a rare and paradoxical beast) for Season Of Mist got in touch to raise issue some points from the previous Drudkh blog, more as a massive fan of the band than 'image management', so for interested parties, his points are in bold and my responses are plain:

If correct, I would recommend getting your historical facts on Ukraine from outside of Polish text books (and to look even further back for an explanation of anti-Polish, anti-Jewish resentments in Ukraine). It is quite easy to get the historic background, if one goes beyond WWII.

Obviously I didn't get my information from Polish text books, I'm English. Secondly I did reference the history of anti-Polish sentiment in the Ukraine prior to WWII, which is confusingly acknowledged in a later paragraph (1). Thirdly as what I was writing was in direct response to Drudkh's more overt nationalist references, it wasn't really up to me what I passed comment on.

That comparison to Radovan Karadžić is beyond me, except for the purpose of introducing another murderous war criminal... but while everybody else in Europe is allowed to build nation, Ukraine is obviously not, well according to you: “But what we can pass damning judgment on is that the Ukraine they fought for was defined purely on ethnic lines where clear ethnic lines didn’t necessarily exists – especially as the would-be nation had formed part of a union with Poland and Lithuania for centuries...” (1) as if there had been no struggle against this “union” in those centuries – compare: (and to look even further back for an explanation of anti-Polish, anti-Jewish resentments in Ukraine.) By the way, Lithuanians are part of the Baltic language family and very clearly separated – quite a bad argument for the point you are so desperately struggling to make. Well, you English like “unions” as the Irish can tell part of your empire for centuries, which proves... – (oops, I get polemic, sorry, but I should not pass damning judgement). And where did ever clear ethnic lines exist? That was a romantic notion lacking historic facts all over this... but hey, if you are a Ukrainian patriot at the time, you are obviously a Nazi as defined by you above... err, what?

This point is very confused. I don't think it's up for debate that every people who find themselves without a free homeland are entitled to one, if necessary fight for it. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the chunk of this sprawling commonwealth that would become the Ukraine was influenced by centuries of outside influences, its major cities were heavily Polish and, more recently, in the late 18th Century, Russian Jews had been encouraged to settle thereand in Poland - their poverty and obvious outsider status (which even established, cosmopolitan Polish Jews resented) contributing to what would become grotesquely genocidal antisemitism by the time the Einsatzgruppen party squads turned up in their mobile party wagons. But what the individuals and organisations canonised by Drudkh were fighting for wasn't a nation defined by geographic boundaries but by the (often perceived, and by calling it a "romantic notion" you're agreeing that the definition was bogus and no such demarcation between Poles and Ukrainians was realistically possible, which makes your implied apologism of their murderous methods seem a touch bizarre) ethnicity of the people within it, resulting in what can only be described as ethnic cleansing to use contemporary language.

There are plenty of examples of this in history and they are all, without exception abhorrent. The expulsion of Germans and Hungarians from Czechoslovakia after the Second World War, the population transfers between Greece and Turkey in 1923, the partition of Pakistan and India, and you'll be particularly excited to note, the expulsion of Irish Catholics from their land in Cromwell's Act of Settlement - all of these are the inhuman actions of a state that values its integrity above human lives, so no, being a Ukrainian patriot at the time doesn't make you a "Nazi", but being a Ukrainian patriot who believes that all Poles and Jews should either leave their homes, or go to a mass grave in the woods, that does put you on the wrong side of any objective moral line.

Why you find comfort in Slayer openly embracing that fascist murderer Pinochet, but condemn Drudkh for choosing to remain silent and let their art speak, is hardly understandable - well have fun with it.

I find comfort in the fact that Slayer are able to have a public/open discourse about their beliefs, yet Drudkh won't - leaving us to draw our own conclusions, which is the point of the original piece. If an English band (with links to openly racist bands) were to embrace murderous, puritanical despot/national hero and defender of parliamentary democracy (delete to fit view) Oliver Cromwell and refuse to do interviews while aligning themselves with a right wing 30s political movement, any sane man would jump to the same conclusion. And I am having fun with it, it's fun to learn and it's fun to discuss. Discussion is, after all, the furnace where views are tempered.

COMMENT: Satanic Warmaster probably aren’t Nazis, just idiots

The bête noir of Antifa’s Finnish branch, Satanic

Warmaster ooze Third Reich fetishism from every pore. Sole member Satanic Tyrant Werwolf ambiguously phrased certainly contemporary ideologies which are rooted in Nazism, but without saying whether they were universal healthcare or ethnic cleansing, and hanging around with 100 per cent unrepentant, Sieg Heiling arseclowns like Absurd and Der Stürmer, he allows people looking for a reason to wave pitchforks to construct the reason themselves. Fascism and racism are very real concerns; there are enough genuine hateful idiots around without your kneejerk Antifa bottle-flinger rounding up the 2 + 2.5 to 5 just because it’s a ‘cleaner’ number with no messy uncertainty that keeps you from getting a good old witchunt under way.

Listing the Nazi references is a bit of a duck hunt for a band whose second demo was called ‘Gas Chamber’, but this kind of infantile taboo-busting was old and boring when Satanic Warmaster sprung into being in 1998, and actual evidence about what this jet black dildo genuine believes is thin on the ground. Early demos described his stance as ‘Occult nationalism’, which seems to be a profound belief in two things which are equally stupid and made up, but that hasn’t cropped up since. Although, predictably enough for this blend of bombastic , tremolo-raping hornets’ nest black metal, both are cravenly hinted at by every other song title, as they have been by almost every band in the genre – albeit not quite with Satanic Tyrant Werwolf’s autistic frequency. After over a decade of existence he’s crammed enough Third Reich slogans, lyrics and buzzwords into his album and merchandise to reconstruct ‘Mein Kampf’ a segment at a time like a set of hateful fridge magnets, but he has yet to produce a sentence which actually sets out what he believes, instead hiding behind a set of dull clichés about the blood of dead warriors, marauding wolfpacks and the like.

Satanic Warmaster are worst than fascists, they’re just boring and silly, and their sly little backward glances towards actually coming out and saying something controversial are only offensive to the values of people who are looking to be offended.

COMMENT: Drudkh right, do we just take their word for it?

‘I just like the music, I don’t have to agree with them,’ is only a convincing argument up to a certain point. All art is political, in that it’s the product of a certain backdrop, set of circumstances or cultural context – you can appreciate the end result, it doesn’t make you a goosestepping Third Reich sympathiser or personally responsible for dragging Anne Frank from her attic window, but you have to acknowledge just what it is that gives this piece of music its glistening, copper-toned resonance. Any fear about what the music you identify with says about you is tantamount to admitting that the music DOES say something about you, because it doesn’t have to, you CAN just enjoy it as music but an unwillingness to explore the beliefs behind a band is wilful ignorance, like reading ‘the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe’ and pretending it’s got nothing to do with Jesus.

Part of the problems with confronting the Far Right in extreme metal is that all sides are reliant upon a lexicon which lacks a consensus of meaning. To a pitchfork-waving liberal left witchhunter ‘Nazi’ is a blanket term for anyone slightly to the right of odious Daily Mail pundit Richard Littlejohn – the core tenants being vague ethnonationalism hidden behind a malevolent cloak of ‘common sense’, ‘fairness’, ‘our country’ and ‘our values’ – and defenders of their odious beliefs fall back on the semantic argument that not being followers of German National Socialism as espoused by Adolf Hitler, they can’t possibly be Nazis. It’s an unconvincing slight of hand that a worrying percentage happily accept as the case being closed, wheeling out a extra defence so dense that it insults the intelligence of anyone who comes into contact with it: ‘Given how x nation/people suffered in the Second World War, they can’t possibly be Nazis!’. Almost every nation on earth has a political Far Right, and almost every nation in Europe – from Britain’s British Union of Fascists to Hungary’s Arrow Cross Party – has a history of unpleasant ethnic nationalism contemporaneous to that of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. To compound the insult and further establish this dishwater premise that should be quickly discarded, Nick Griffin frequently drags up his family’s war record as evidence as to why his vile racist organisation clearly aren’t vile racists.

Where these tired and overtrodden arguments involve Drudkh, and indeed all of Roman Saenko’s folksy black metal projects, is that they’ve helpfully released a statement making it clear they’re not supporting “racism and political extremism” and claiming "there's nothing in Drudkh's music or lyrics that would suggest any political outlook", and yet refuse to talk about their beliefs (or anything, in fact). Yes, Slayer have songs about murderous Auschwitz camp doctors, but Slayer do interviews and we can all sleep better at night for having answers to our questions.

That they know a statement about their politics is necessary means they know full well it requires more discourse. And the reasons rests upon their appropriation of 19^th Century Ukrainian nationalist poets (most prominently Taras Shevchenko), on 2005’s ‘The Swan Road’, the Ukrainian Insurgent Army partisans in the Second World War, on 2006’s ‘Blood In Our Wells’, which is dedicated to the Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera, their use of the slogan, on 2007’s ‘Anti-Urban’ EP, ‘Conservative Revolutionary’ (which they share with their openly racist parent entity Hate Forest), which is drawn from the pre-war German political party of the same name. The intentions and the Far Right credentials behind all of these sources is open to interpretation to differing extents, but seeing as the band aren’t prepared to entertain a dialogue around them how can we be possibly held to account for drawing out own conclusions?

Taras Shevchenko was effectively the father modern Ukrainian literature, just as Ukraine was beginning to establish its contemporary national identity, pressing against the Russian Empire, of which it was a component, and Poland, of which it had previously formed the edge (Ukraine coming from the Polish for ‘edge’ or ‘corner’) before being swallowed up by the Empire. He insulted the tsar and church, and was an active pan-Slav (campaigning for a federation of Slavic peoples, many who were under the feudal bootheels of the Ottoman Turks or Austrian Hapsbergs), so definitely an internationalist as opposed to nationalist, but his peons to the beauty of his homeland definitely fed an emerging nationalism of which Drudkh could be argued to be the latest manifestation.

The Ukrainian Insurgent Army fought for a free Ukraine in the Second World War and unenviably found themselves caught between the rock and hard place of the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany, to a degree they played both factions fairly skillfully, often co-operating with the Waffen SS against the Red Army, and the ethics of their methods are perhaps not for us to pass judgement on. The Eastern Front was a whole other sticky, bloody mess of divided loyalties and lesser evils compared to the relatively tranquil ‘gentlemanly war’ being waged in Western Europe. But what we can pass damning judgment on is that the Ukraine they fought for was defined purely on ethnic lines where clear ethnic lines didn’t necessarily exists – especially as the would-be nation had formed part of a union with Poland and Lithuania for centuries, and then the Russian Empire. And so the Ukrainian Insurgent Army made good their effort to create an ‘ethnic Ukraine’ in the time honoured tradition, one that Bosnian Serb premier turned oddball mystic Radovan Karadžić currently sits in the dock for in the Hague, by the wholesale massacre and expulsion of Poles from their territory. Between 1943 and 1944 between 80-100,000 Poles were murdered, at least 50,000 in one region alone where the Insurgent Army commander Dmytro Klyachkivsky ordered “We should undertake the great action of the liquidation of the Polish element. As the German armies withdraw, we should take advantage of this convenient moment for liquidating the entire male population in the age from 16 up to 60 years. We cannot lose this fight, and it is necessary at all costs to weaken Polish forces. Villages and settlements laying next to the massive forests, should disappear from the face of the earth.”

Stepan Bandera himself exemplified that pragmatic attitude to the Germans perfectly, his declaration of Ukrainian independence could be argued to kowtow to Nazi interests as a matter of survival - the proclamation announcing that the new state "will work closely with the National-Socialist Greater Germany, under the leadership of its leader Adolf Hitler which is forming a new order in Europe and the world", briefly gaining Gestapo protection before German enthusiasm waned and he was set to a concentration camp. When it came to the Poles, like his organisations military wing he was far less ambigious, saying, "[Russians], Poles, Jews are hostile to us must be exterminated in this struggle, especially those who would resist our regime: deport them to their own lands, importantly: destroy their intelligentsia"

Finally, as fans of the Griffin defence will be proud to note, the Conservative Revolutionary party of Weimar Germany did indeed hate the Nazis, and their leader was offed in the Nazi regime’s first act of state terror in 1933 – the Night of the Long Knives. But this wasn’t for particularly saintly reasons, but because the militaristic, liberal-hating, antisemitic Conservative Revolutionaries were a threat to the Nazi monopoly over the Far Right, being an outspoken part of Hitler's right wing coalition. The difference between the two being the classic political conflict between crass, unsubtle populists (the National Socialists) and largely middle class, educated elite (the Conservative Revolutionaries).

At this point it feels like saying Drudkh’s politics are open to interpretation is a bit more generosity than they really deserve.

INTERVIEW: Feeling the buzz with The Locust’s Justin Pearson

If you’ve had even the most cursory encounter with JP’s discography – and that includes looking at pictures of any of his bands and deciding it’s not for you because they’re wearing the wrong t-shirts or wrong sized t-shirts – you’ll be familiar with one of the core tenants running through the abrasive yelping, swirls of feedback and binary riffing; confrontation.

Just as The Locust leapt cat-like onto your face and tried to slice your nerve endings out with their sonic laser-scalpel, ‘From The Graveyard Of The Arousal Industry’, his autobiography, eschews meandering and preamble in favour of – bam – this is the deal, hitting you full-on with a menu of misfortune, bad decisions, prejudice and swagger. Despite being constantly dealt a bum hand by fate, Justin Pearson, bassist and/or vocalist of The Locust, Holy Molar, Some Girls, Swing Kids and the shirtless electro disco inferno that is his most recent project All Leather, isn’t after a cuddle and a hair tousle.

“Awe,” he says simply of the emotional reaction he hopes his text will provoke, adding, “Well just as I am with the music I’m part of, I don’t consider the people who check it out. Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate people being interested in what I’m part of and what I do. But I don’t set out to appease people in any way. With music, we create what we want to create and if it’s received (good and/or bad) then great. The same mindset was part of my book as well. Of course, parts of it might ‘clear up’ that I’m not who some perceive me to be. But that is just a perk of the book existing I suppose.”

Though far from bloodless, JP’s retelling of events is almost from the perspective of an observer to his own life: calm, matter-of-fact and analytical.

“Since I’m not a writer per se, I just wrote little pieces here and there,” he explains. “I suppose it was set up like songs on an album for the most part. I wrote a story. Then another, and another. At some point, I put them together in a linear format, edited the crap out of it all, filled in some spaces that needed stuff added, subtracted some of the crap, then voila! For the most part, I guess I’m ‘detached’ from a lot of stuff. I suppose what one would assume me, or whoever writing stuff like I wrote, would need to be detached, I just realise that with the ‘heavy’ subject matter, I see that it can, or could always be worse. So let’s say my father’s death, perfect example. Yeah, it’s a horrible thing that I had to go though. But I saw it in a light that was objective. See, a lot of people deal with death. And a situation like that made me appreciate my mother more, and it made me appreciate life, circumstances, and ultimately it educated me, hardened me, and put me forth into the ‘real world’ at an early age. Going thought something like that makes getting your ass beat by jocks, skinheads and cops, not seem so bad. You know, I just say, at least I’m alive. And things will hopefully get better at some point. So I suppose that is detachment. But I’d like to just say that things I wrote about gave me the ability to put them into a worldly perspective.”



One recurring motif, shared by hardcore kuckledraggers and Cro-Magnon headbangers alike and closely related to their fear of the unknown and unconventional, is that of hardcore and metal’s last remaining acceptable prejudice. Racists are all escorted to a special subgenre tree house in which they can compose tuneless ditties about the master race in peace, but casual homophobia is as accepted as asking your mum to sew your patches on for you. Being naturally quite elfin is bad enough, but having the temerity to use a few cutting words when a spot of fist swinging (although there’s plenty of that in ‘…Arousal Industry’) would do, JP hears the words ‘faggot’ and ‘poseur’ so often they might as well be a ‘Shaft’-like backing track. He’s been embracing both of these things in terms of style and performance for a good long time, but his latest project in particular seems to be aimed squarely at tackling that final prejudice head-on.



“I think its a social issue that still needs to be addressed,” he insists, “you know, homophobia is the last accepted prejudice. I’m not gay, but I identify with the gay community, I’m part of it really. Plus punk ethics are rooted in gay culture. But ironically enough, I’ve been called the lowest common denominator of names, ‘faggot", from a really early age, maybe six or seven when kids first learned that was an ‘insult’ all the way up to maybe a few days ago. So yeah, it’s an important and relevant thing to bring up, be it in a book, or by a bands shtick. If an issue still exists, such as homophobia, then people who are progressive will find a way to combat that.”

REVIEW: An Autumn For Crippled Children 'Lost' (ATMF)

A release by the tellingly monikered A Sad Sadness Song, the weepy/chin-stroking division of Italy's premier black metal crypto-fascists (“The three principles of nowadays 'égalité, liberté, fraternité' that were aborted from the French revolution here are perceived as senseless, offensive and immoral”) ATMF, An Autumn For Crippled Children are more than just a brilliant band name and some dodgy friends.

Opening with delicate brush strokes across a watercolour landscape evocative of later Primordial, this Dutch trio drag simple beauty into heartwrenching depths of depressive, howling, raw black metal like (if you'll excuse the plunge into outright pretentious wankery) John Everett Millais' depiction of the drowning of Ophelia. Building steadily to a thunderous conclusion, like a body bound for a waterfall, as more and more layers are thrown up, walling in the gentle instrumentals with a lo-fi battery drenched in distortion and leaden reverb, somewhere between NeurIsisian thunder and the pastoral unpleasantness of Drudkh.

REVIEW: Lautstürmer 'Depopulator' (Power It Up)

When musicians best known for one particular, straight-ahead brand of their chosen genre bash out another project in the field, there's little obvious joy to be had, often more of the same with diminished returns - like an over Xeroxed show flyer where the letters are running together. Yet just as Extreme Noise Terror's bellowing ox Dean Jones returns to his d-beat infancy with the rebooted and reinvigorated Raw Noise, eaking out unpretentious, no-holds-barred thrills from oversubscribed territory, two former and one current member of Swedish metallic crust heavyweights Driller Killer are doing exactly the same with Lautstürmer.

Their debut album proper following a super limited, five-track 7”/cassette, 'Depopulator's twelve tracks of rousing gutterpunk rebellion are competent and cranked from the heart, yet if that feels a bit back handed, it's because it is. What lifted Raw Noise's recent full-length return, the white hot rager that was 'System Never', up from being merely one of a dozen of that week's effortlessly listenable d-beat discharges was the immitable vocal rock fall of the bleached blonde one, a blunt pile-up of vowels and spittal like a violent curbstomp on the eardrums. Without that, Lautstürmer are just another of that week's effortlessly listenable d-beat discharges, and another bunch of Swedish cider-garglers raging impotently through the proscribed means, taking us neatly through to the bittersweet state of playing d-beat in 2010: nearly impossible to fuck up and nearly impossible to do anything exciting with. Unless you're Dean Jones and there's an angry bison lodged in your throat, obviously.

REVIEW: Coffinworm 'Where All Became None' (Profound Lore)

In North America especially, the roots of sludge, death metal, black metal and grindcore are deeply entangled in the same moist soil of hardcore punk, overlapping and tongue-tussling in the most visible way possible, and yet its so easy to forget how porous these Wikipedia-enforced definitions of different shades of shit really are, especially from a European perspective where genre history, and therefore definition, is srs bsns.

By no means the first to dance along the line, Coffinworm have become one of the most celebrated proponents of multi-dimensional nastiness in broad quarters of the underworld (thanks to the klaxon-like blaring of the auto-hype function implicit in anything Profound Lore put their name to), blending blackened rasps and tar-thick atmosphere, piledriving Moonfog riffs, cavernous early death metal rumble and oddly misplaced blasting, into one bitter, sludge whole. Aside from the blasting interludes which punctuate the carefully woven filth like your nan knocking on the door with a cup of hot chocolate, 'Where All Became None' remains a coherantly focused exercise in utter filth, one that lurches from a purposeful, almost black 'n' roll swagger to a desperate, stomach churning crawl every bit as organically and inevitably as a long night out turned painfully sour.

INTERVIEW: Kill Trend Suicide: Brutal Truth’s glorious history of fucking up

“One of the cool things that I like about Brutal Truth is we never really do the same thing twice,” drawls Brutal Truth’s bearded frontman Kevin Sharp from a histrionic Skype connection to the vocalist’s unfeasibly bright and sunny Georgia home. “We play extreme music and there’s no formula to it. We do what feels fun, alright, there. Each record looks and sounds entirely different; it’s cool to be afforded the option to move around. A lot of the people who’re into Brutal Truth, they have their favourite periods but are extremely open minded and allow us the opportunity to move around – and that’s cool.”

This is the preamble to the conversation imprinted into the glossy bedsheets of Terrorizer #196, out now (buy it here if you haven’t picked it up yet), in which Kevin recalls the long and bleak winter in snow-locked, rural New England where he and his bandmates worked on their second full-length and final offering for an increasingly less patient Earache, 1994’s ‘Need To Control’. It’s a contentious choice for a ‘classic’ though, more people would swear by the band’s debut, the ferocious ‘Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses’, or their final album prior to the original split in 1998 (reuniting in 2007 and releasing the thunderous ‘Evolution Through Revolution’ in 2009), 1997’s crazy, careening ‘Sounds Of The Animal Kingdom’. ‘Need To Control’ though, was a bold move in its climate with grindcore and death metal orthodoxy being the order of the day and the potential for commercial returns high for those who ticked the boxes and plodded on, it also placed them on the cover of Terrorizer during their tour with Macabre. Everyone has a theory, and all are equally valid, well, most are equally valid, some are more valid than others. Our grindstone cowboy seems particularly proud of their 1996 offering and first for long term collaborators Relapse.

“It’s not like certain bands, like Cannibal Corpse, who have to deliver the same kinda thing. Not saying this, that or the other about those kinda bands, because they’re awesome, but they’re kinda forced to write in a certain aspect. Go ahead, knock yourself out. I happen to like ‘Kill Trend Suicide’ – I think it sounds weird. We recorded that one in a studio that was falling apart and there were moments in time that were completely lost because the studio was exploding constantly. I recorded in my lunch break; I was working in a record store two doors down. So each record sounds totally different. ‘Need To Control’ is dynamically awesome and sonically good, but that was a struggle, it was a struggle. ‘Extreme Conditions…’ was like one of those things like an accident, like a discharge – a moment in time and there were only a handful of bands like it in the extreme scene back then. They all have different mentalities; I rarely have the same thought twice.”

Though ‘Need To Control’ was something of a headfuck for grind purists, a dislocated and uneasy swirl of mechanical riffs, bursts of static, looped riffs and strange noises, for Kevin, the chaos brought everything a lot closer to home.

“We just went back to our roots. I grew up punk, y’know, I got into metal through the back door. There was a Germs cover, when I was a kid I was a big fan of The Germs, and it just had all the elements, there was some breathing space, everything wasn’t so structured. Not many people got it when it first came out, people pick and choose what sucks and what doesn’t, and that’s cool, it says that you’re doing something interesting.”

Ironically, while more punk in spirit, ‘Need To Control’ was significantly ‘less punk’ in appearance with an understated typeface logo and somewhat inaccessible and alien cover art, certainly a bold statement in the face of its predecessor’s orthodox anarchopunk collage.

“‘Extreme Conditions…’ went down that whole Crass route, everyone did that back in the day. That whole cut’n’paste. It was indicative of that whole scene, y’know. It was exciting, whether it was Destroy, Disrupt, Napalm Death, Extreme Noise Terror – it was all new and interesting and everyone was doing their own thing. Then everyone just went in their own direction, if you look at the ‘classic’ bands, they all followed their own experimentation. Carcass went into the more structured metal thing, Napalm went into their Cocteau Twins, 12” Swans whatever, everyone elaborated into whatever their own personal interests were outside of recording – obviously mine were more just rudimentary punk and crust punk – there’s a Nausea cover on the 12” and stuff. We did a lot of really weird things. If you look at the bands that were around then, there was a lot of the freedom to do whatever the hell they wanted to. People always ask nowadays what I think of contemporary grind bands and they’ve all kinda boxed themselves into a certain stylistic thing, y’know. It’s a shame, because the whole point of grindcore was to elaborate.”

This thoroughly punk rock greenie gobbing on yesterday’s Brutal Truth left them free to spin the wheel and mount the curb.

“It opened the gates, you had the artwork for ‘Kill Trend Suicide’ which was my buddy Bill [Yurkiewicz, Exit 13 vocalist] with a gun in his head. It’s weird, over the course of time certain people get into certain things. The ‘Sounds Of The Animal Kingdom’ was just a straight up ‘fuck you’ to everything, it was dirty, people moaned about the production. Get a dick, dude, it was supposed to be dirty. What’s so kind about a middle finger? You do things over the course of time; you see the ape-man tattoos, you heard some guy paid like $400 on eBay for the broken TV that was on the artwork to ‘Kill Trend…’ and it obviously meant something to someone on a deep, impassioned level and that’s cool. I’d rather be someone’s favourite or totally hated than sorta liked, it comes with some baggage – I’ve been a hero and an asshole to most everyone in my life, I’m good with that. You’ve got to be secure in yourself.”

It can’t be a coincidence that the year Brutal Truth freaked out and tossed their blast-quota out the window was just as the hype-levels surrounding death metal (and to a lesser extent grindcore) were tickling the chin like rising water in sinking sub, MTV and major labels circling like hawks, and bands popping up ever week as if pressed from a sprue.

“Everyone and their mother,” he sighs. “If you do music professionally, everyone wants to consider themselves before they consider you and the problem that comes with that is that, even on our level which I just call low cut punk rock, do it yourself, people make their living offa you and everybody has their expectations. There’s obviously pressure on that level, booking agents, record label monkeys, radio fuckwits and all that kinda stuff have their nose in your ass and expect you to do whatever. I’m not a fucking pop band and never have been, I could write a fucking pop song for sure, and Vanilla Ice is my fucking hero, but if I wanted to do that I would just create that band. I did jazz records, I did metal records and punk records, that sorta thing, and if wanted a pop record I’d do a pop record. If I wanted expectations I would entertain them, but I want Brutal Truth and I’m sorry Dig didn’t like it, and in hindsight, not a lot of people did.

“Before that record everyone stayed on their own court, everyone stayed on their own home team, nobody really took chances – bands like Death did Death records, bands like Dark Angel did Dark Angel records and now there’re bands all the time who’re free to move around. We just did a tour in Japan with Converge and they’ve always moved around. Maybe not musically, but intent-wise that record had some impact with other bands, telling people not to be so narrow. Hopefully some of the newer grind bands will take something, not sonically, but just the aspect behinds it. Try and take what you do and elaborate on it. Take it outside the box, scratch and sniff.”

Considering almost all of what your average rivethead knows about ‘Need To Control’ is how much Earache generally fucked it (“it was like a breech birth, just a nightmare - the head came out last and it came out with flippers and fins”), it’s surprising that it’s taken so long for label boss and grindcore’s pantomime villain Digby Pearson to make an appearance. Still, what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

“Obviously,” agrees Kevin, “everything has a direct reflection on it. Records are just a reflection of where four dudes are at in that particular point in time, it’s a snapshot. When we recorded that record, it was the place where we recorded ‘Extreme Conditions…’, where we always recorded, it was called Baby Monster, we knew the place well and it had this antique-y board set-up with all this tube shit, it was fucking awesome, totally fucking ‘70s good where the sounds were warm and you could do a lot with it. They were courted by the whole Sony, and there was this jackass from Colombia who really wanted to use Baby Monster and we got pushed out of that one while we were recording. I was doing my vocals at the time and they told us we had to leave. I said, ‘That’s fine, put us in a place that’s compatible’. And they put us in this other studio, while that was a ‘70s mood, this was an ‘80s mood – a real kinda r’n’b kinda thing. I was recording my vocals, and the band next to us, C+C Music Factory, it was like ‘pump up the jams boom-boom-boom’, it was this pop r’n’b shit. It was a completely opposite tonal place where you couldn’t find a guitar – there was no guitar. And we got in to record and after two days said, ‘Dig, man, we just can’t do it here, man, it’s impossible’, and trying to explain to the [Colombia] record label guy why this was impossible was impossible. So we ended up putting this that and the other off, and we ended up doing a three-month tour in Europe, and then dropped into London – made friends with Mitch Dickinson [Unseen Terror] – everything happens for a reason, man.”

Having by his own admission mellowed considerably over the years, Kevin Sharp and his misshapen fruit bowl of grindcore misfits hold no grudges and no-one accountable, what’s done is done, and it’s left some awesome, unlikely and downright fucking weird memories in its wake.

“I’ve got a really funny story about ‘Extreme Conditions…’, Dig was on his budget thing and we were sorta pressed for time. We had two days to mix the record and this was back in the olden glory days when everyone had their mixing duties, when the clock hits x-o’clock this fader went up and this fader went down, and people were cutting tape and pasting it back together. This was pre-digital. Anyway, we were pressed for time and Colin [Richardson, producer] bit into this table, I guess when he was a kid and he was in a bar he got his face smashed and lost some teeth, so he had this bridge going across the front side of his mouth with some fake teeth and nobody knew anything about it. He was just negative energy in motion; he’d touch a stop button and black out some room, that sorta thing. He’d just touch things and they’d break. He was like an engineer’s worst nightmare, we were running around with rubbing alcohol and things to clean up his total mess. But he bit into this table and lost his teeth because he couldn’t go out for some dental glue because we hadn’t time to stop, so this poor guy was talking and we were trying not to laugh, but it was impossible because…” he breaks into cartoonish spluttering. “You’re trying not to laugh at the guy because he’s stretched out of his mind but he’s talking at you with spit flying outta his mouth! That was ‘Extreme Conditions…’.”