Blast Eats: Introduction/Deluxe Potato Cakes

Music, for me, can be as much about the people behind the songs as the songs themselves. Because of this, I've always loved interviews that share more than album details and what trashy horror film a band picked their name from. Grindcore's street-level, everyperson sensibilities make it perfectly tailored to this interest of mine, and I, like many others love when a band mentions being influenced by something I love, or simply liking to do the same things that I do.

For these reasons, I've decided to put together a feature where members of grindcore bands (and some others along the way) share their favorite recipes, to celebrate a universal, community aspect of everyone's lives that seems to get lost among hand-screened album covers and basement-painted t-shirts in the punk ethos: cooking. I'm starting the feature off with my own favorite recipe for cheesy bacon potato cakes (yeah, they've got to be terrible for you, but they make up for that by being fantastic), and you can expect some awesome recipes from actually talented people very soon.


Bacon Deluxe Potato Cakes

2 Medium potatoes
1 Cup onion, diced
3 slices uncooked bacon, sliced into 1" (2 1/2 cm) pieces
3 eggs
1 cup grated New York Sharp Cheddar cheese
oil for frying
Salt, pepper and other seasonings to taste

Wash and shred potatoes into hashbrown-sized strings. Carefully strain off excess liquid (yeah, you might lose some nutrients, but your potato cakes will stick together that much better). Set potatoes in a bowl and set aside.
Fry bacon in a pan or skillet, cooking until halfway done. Set aside.
Crack eggs, and separate yolks from whites in a cup, immediately depositing yolks into your potato mixture. [Feel free to add a portion of the egg whites for an eggier texture; don't add too much or your patties won't adhere properly.] Freeze your egg whites in a baggy (marked with the number of eggs and the date you froze them) for future use in a mousse or egg white omelet.
Add onion, bacon and cheese to your potato mixture. Add ground pepper, salt, dried chilies or other seasonings to taste. Using your hands, combine ingredients thoroughly.
Add about 3/4" (2 cm) of oil to a clean skillet, or enough to halfway submerge your patties. Turn your burner to around medium and begin heating up your oil.
Begin forming patties around the size of the palm of your hand, and once your oil is hot enough, start frying several of these patties. Cook each side around 2 minutes, or until each side is golden brown and fully cooked.
After each is cooked to your taste, remove to a paper towel-covered plate, and sponge off any excess grease with another paper towel. When finished, plate with spiced sour cream or Sriracha mayonnaise dipping sauce and serve.

Veganize It: This recipe can be easily made vegan by using a vegan cheese of your choice, substituting store bought fake bacon or homemade tempeh bacon for its meat counterpart, and using vegan egg replacer or vegan mayonnaise as a binding agent in the place of eggs. Vegan ranch or Sriracha mayo made with one of the many varieties of eggless, vegan mayonnaise will both work great as a dipping sauce.
Note: Different vegan cheese products melt at different times and temperatures. If you know you have a softer, quicker-melting product, consider initially leaving the cheese out, frying the first side and then removing the patties from the oil and combining the cheese with the uncooked second side before returning your patties to the pan.

Femtekolonnare- Välkommen till Växjö

If you have been reading this blog long enough, you’ll have noted a recurring theme in a number of my reviews regarding prejudices and reserving judgment. My rampant liberalism aside, this can be attributed to the fact that my opinions are most often proven spectacularly wrong.

Case in point: my treatment of Swedish grindcore and powerviolence. Despite a general affinity for Sweden itself, I find that too often the grindcore it exports seems to share an overly-manicured, safe quality with its famous death metal. Acts like Rotten Sound, Splitter, Sayyadina, even Nasum sound too polished, too over-engineered to me, lacking the violence and urgency that makes this style so vital. For this reason, I generally write off most Swedish extreme music as embracing this pitfall. And most of the time, I’m right.

In this case, however, it was quite a pleasant surprise to be proven wrong by the dirty, blastbeaten Swedish fastcore of Femtekolonnare and their newest tape, the seven-track Välkommen till Växjö.

Led off by a vocal sample that ends in a “One, two, one-two-three-four” count off, A-side opener “Och bilen går bra” smashes open into a high-pitched grind that gradually commingles with punk riffage until finally blinking out of existence to usher in the next track. The EP’s exact middle, the awesomely titled “Spela Snabbare” (“Play faster”) finds the band indulging its most punk rock tendencies, riding a simple (but gut-level satisfying) chord progression through a series of changes, including a shout/scream call-and-response between vocalists Fritjof and Jonas. Speed-freaked closer “Ett jävla daltande” ends the tape on a frantic note, though the band still leaves room for two second-long drum breaks that offer another example of the vital stylistic diversity that distinguishes this band from its peers.

Lyrically, the band favors a humorous, often satirical anti-establishment style, evidenced by titles that Google Translate tells me mean things like “Everyone Laughs at the Cops” and “Öjaby - Växjö's Asshole.” That humor is a crucial ingredient to what would otherwise be a collection of finger-pointing sociopolitical punk songs, not exactly uncommon to this style of music.

Välkommen till Växjö’s packaging is minimally but tastefully designed, all blacks, white and greys, as befits a DIY hardcore tape of its ilk. Drummer Carl’s choice of typography and abstracted, militant images recalls the old school in a modern way that comes off as referencing rather than aping it.

This release, neither the band’s most aggressive nor its most crust-leaning, offers an effective entry point to the rest of their catalog for that very reason. It’s this balance of styles that makes Femtekolonnare so noteworthy, blistering energy and light-hearted, moshing punk trading off in such equal measure that they serve as a suitable soundtrack to both riotous anger and righteous air-drumming.

Välkommen till Växjö is available through Ingen Våg.

The band have also recorded material for a split with Germany's Love Channel, expected to be released some time this year on Vulgar Records.

Other Releases

In Vino Veritas (2010)- 16-track cd-r and the band’s longest release to date. Notable track(s): “Hippiesvin”, “Fred, kärlek och jävla dumheter”

Med segerrika vapen (2010)- 4-track tape that includes one of my favorites from the band, “Tafatta snutkukar.” Notable track(s): “Tafattasnutkukar” 

Valguiden (2010)- 8-track cd-r released a month before the Swedish parliamentary election that dedicates a track to slamming each of the Swedish political parties. Notable track(s): “Sossarna”, “Källsorteringspartiet"

[Note: The band sent me copies for review.]

Lycanthrophy- LP

 

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by time. That is the life of men.” – Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)

No band’s road to its first LP is quite identical to any other. Some begin by slowly riding the demo circuit, eventually working up to the big LP; others put out their first full-length before releasing a note of other material (in some cases, even before touring). Still others churn out splits and obscure tape releases for years without a hint of longplayer aspirations, leaving fans in perpetual fear of a breakup prior to even a proper debut album.

Czech grinders Lycanthrophy’s trajectory up until now offers perhaps the best working blueprint of this third route (next to pre-2011 Archagathus, that is). Now that they’ve finally crossed the threshold into LP territory, the most pressing question yet looms large: Was it worth the wait?

The material on this LP mostly continues the trajectory the band has plotted over a series of splits with bands like Suffering Mind, F.U.B.A.R., Gride and Kursk, maintaining the ferocious, crusty fastcore sound heard on those releases (while beefed-up considerably for full length presentation). On the twenty tracks that compose this self-titled debut, some of the best tracks from those recent splits coexist (in re-recorded form) with new material for a seamless, accomplished fastcore experience.

The latter is most likely the reason you picked up this release in the first place, and it doesn’t disappoint.

Cymbal hits like the beeping of a timed explosive open the album, and “Tighten Your Belts” detonates into a fast, moshing track that grinds like industrial recycling machinery for its :47 run-time.

“Born With Debts” follows with a strafing machinegun assault, vocals, drums and guitars jumping on the track almost in tandem to blast away any doubts that the band slowed down (or “sold out”) for this full-length. Its snarling punk anger is vintage Lycanthrophy, and it ends up being one of the best cuts on the album.

“Primitive Game” shifts nicely from a thrash-punk stroll to a stop-start grind with guitars that whine like power drills, and pauses a moment to reflect on its thrashy beginnings before tacking on a couple of blastbeats for good measure.

One disappointment for fans familiar with material from their other releases is playing the old split tracks and their re-recorded incarnations on this LP side-by-side. While the new recordings fit better with what is overall a more accomplished, mature playing style on this record, what they sacrifice is a fury, a violence, a lack of polish that the older recordings of songs like “Vomit and Celebrities,” “Fur Farms” and “The Morning After” had that ultimately made them so exciting.

This is the sound of a band that’s found its comfort zone; while that familiarity means, in this case, an album’s worth of across-the-board solid, consistent material, it also means a recording experience apparently devoid of the friction that can sometimes spark a band’s most vital, energetic in-studio moments.

The fuller production found on this LP accounts for some of that apparent spit-shine, but don’t expect some big, structured, major-league metal “production”. The true hallmark of production done right on a punk release such as this one is that you forget it’s there, other than to note that it doesn’t sound like Agathocles recorded it in a vegan taco truck or some Swedish perfectionists laser-honed it in a hermetically sealed lab hundreds of yards underground. Nothing is unbalanced or frightfully compressed, and the drums are mic-ed well enough that they don’t sound like a group of drum circle buskers on a subway platform. Mission accomplished.

Despite the lack of boundary-pushing and the presence of older material, Lycanthrophy turns in a solid, heart-pumping (or -ripping, judging by the artwork) album of fastcore that will appeal strongly to fans of Disrupt and Siege, as well as those of the burgeoning Eastern European grind-wave. So, was it worth the wait? Yes, most emphatically, with the caveat that we don’t have to wait this long for a second dose.

ACxDC- The Second Coming EP

“Then, standing before a closet mirror, he put the automatic to his head, at the point of the pterion, and pressed the comfortably concaved trigger. Nothing happened—or perhaps everything happened, and his destiny simply forked at that instant, as it probably does sometimes at night, especially in a strange bed, at stages of great happiness or great desolation, when we happen to die in our sleep, but continue our normal existence, with no perceptible break in the faked serialization, on the following, neatly prepared morning, with a spurious past discreetly but firmly attached behind.” – Vladimir Nabokov, Ada, or Ardor: A Family Chronicle (1969)

In the case of both bands and people, death is an eventuality. However, unlike people, the death of bands is sometimes only a question of your timeline.

ACxDC were a Southern California grind-inflected powerviolence crew formed in 2003. After releasing their Jack Trippin’ demo and the He Had It Comin’ EP, the band split up in 2005, though what seemed like death turned out to be a lot more like hibernation, since the band re-formed in 2010 and has this 2011 EP to prove that their death certificate was signed prematurely.

ACxDC pack a breakdown-friendly style of grindviolence that conjures up nostalgia for late 90s-mid 2000s acts (including superior mid-career material from the now-overhyped Magrudergrind), which makes sense considering that their last EP came out when Bush presidency cracks were still topical humor. Despite sounding slightly dated, there’s an undeniable energy to these 6 tracks, even if I’m slightly nonplused by the tight-panted, spin-kicking teens that I can’t help but picture dancing to most of these tunes.

What stands out as the real draw of these songs is their sense of fun and lightness, meshed in with extreme music’s harshness in a way that brings to mind Spazz (minus the unorthodoxy and awesome curveballs like the Kool Keith drop). “No Fly Zone” opens with a thrash gallop that jumps into a fast, moshing part that sounds like a pit full of grinning punk kids (rather than the scowling meatheads you’re more likely to run into at shows these days) and blasts out its conclusion in a way that’s more energetic than threatening. Even “T-Shirt Time” (and yes, that’s a Jersey Shore reference), a bulldozing grinder that’s one of the EP’s most aggressive cuts, eschews malice for punked-out speed.

That last song title encapsulates one of two major complaints to be lodged about The Second Coming, neither musical. The first complaint comes from the utter inanity of about half of the song titles, many ostensibly pop-culture references (“Milk was a Bad Choice” and the aforementioned “T-Shirt Time”) but some (“Fuck It Dood…Let’s Go Bowling”) just eye-rollingly goofy. The problem is compounded when you peruse the lyrics; "Milk was a Bad Choice" is actually about Anchorman (sample lyrics: "I am trapped behind a mustache/I'm a goddamn glass case of emotion"), "No Fly Zone" follows the plot of the HBO comedy series Flight of the Conchords, and "T-Shirt Time" is a diatribe against the MTV series that coined its titular phrase. Third track "Leech" is the only one seemingly exempt from the pop culture bonanza, focusing instead on selfish, leech-like people in the author's life (and who knows, it could just be about a film or series that I'm not catching the reference to).

The second (and more major, since it has a negative effect on the flow of the album, unlike the song titles and lyrics) complaint is a classic, so much so that Andrew Childers over at G&P has practically drafted a constitutional amendment against it: namely, haphazard and unnecessary use of pre- and post-song sampling from films and other media. Anchorman, The Dark Knight and slacker classic The Big Lebowski (probably my favorite comedy of all time, on an unrelated note) all make an appearance here, and while an argument could be made that fun being a major part of the band’s aesthetic makes up for the overuse of samples, that argument is overruled by the fact that most of the songs are the worse for wear because of it. While the songs and samples are obliquely related, since “Jokes on You” (sic) contains the “And I thought my jokes were bad…” line from The Dark Knight’s Joker, “Fuck It Dood…Let’s Go Bowling” contains The Jesus’ angry ranting from The Big Lebowski and “Milk Was a Bad Choice” contains dialogue from Anchorman, it’s not enough to make up for their execution, and it winds up feeling like the samples are meant to make up for (probably non-existent) shortcomings in songwriting.

ACxDC are some of the best around at peppering the punked-out everyman intensity of powerviolence with helpings of grindcore’s highspeed shriek, and several back-to-back listens of the earlier He Had it Comin’ EP and this Book of Mormon of an EP should make willing converts of any worshippers at the Altar of Magrudergrind you might have in your acquaintance. Once you get past the samples and stop reading the song titles, this is an EP more than worth the shelf or harddrive space of any powerviolence and grindcore obsessive, and I can only hope that the band doesn’t decide to call it quits again before “coming” at least a few more times.

You can find The Second Coming EP, as well as the rest of their material, available (very cheaply) for purchase at their Bandcamp account.

I’ll also take this chance to mention the fact that band member Sergio’s baby daughter is in desperate need of heart surgery, and the band are asking for assistance through PayPal donations, shirt purchases, show attendance and any other way you can find to help out.

The Kill- Shower of Bricks EP

A favorite old saw of mine is the ability of certain albums to evoke different things from a listener, like a particular mood, aesthetic, image or idea. Some feel cinematic, and bring to mind cyberpunk or horror films, while others recall surrealism or political uprising. Shower of Bricks, the latest EP from the Australian grind madmen in The Kill, recalls something more basic than any of these examples: this record sounds like pure violence.

After a four-second The Exorcist sample that serves as an intro, the band smashes out of the gate with "Trolley Pushing Zombies," a frothing minute of grind that embodies the speed, brevity and sheer relentlessness that I love about this band, so much so that it's probably going to be the song I use to introduce my friends to The Kill from now on.

The EP's eponymous track offers some of the few slower seconds on the entire MCD (and it's still murderously fast, if that tells you anything) in the brief sustained strum that begins the song and a few loping riffs that serve to keep the pacing interesting. It also happens to be one of the catchier songs, as I found myself recognizing it, especially the scream-shout vocals and circular riff pattern that occurs around the mid section, after a few blind listens.

Two songs, "Pub Brawl" and "Utterly Unimportant," appeared previously on the band's Blast Beat'n the Shit Outta PBS radio session album, though the improved production and volume on this record let the song shine in a way the other versions couldn't. While the drumstick count-off on the radio performance of "Pub Brawl" suggests that a click track may have played a part in the improvement, it doesn't change the fact that the songs are at their best in this crisp, higher quality form.

The one-two punch of a dramatic descending riff followed by a chugging stop-start riff, both slightly reminiscent of Discordance Axis, make "Passed Out" a perfect closer, with a brief runtime that means you'll be lunging to restart the album the second it ends.

The songs on this EP merge the "all fast parts" ethos Jon Chang perfected with Gridlink with the aural horror that Repulsion and Pig Destroyer ooze, underscored by an unpretentious attitude that classic grind fans will instantly gravitate toward. This is unquestionably the band's best effort to date, and while little has changed fundamentally in their snarling, blood-soaked style, it finds them at an unprecedented level of musical focus that would be a top-five year-end shoo-in if carried across an LP.

If my review of The Soundtrack to Your Violence a while ago didn't have you rushing to check out their material, let this be your mulligan, because The Kill is still among the best pure grindcore bands operating today and more than deserves your attention.


Listen:

"Trolley Pushing Zombies" (Bandcamp)

"Shower of Bricks" (Soundcloud)

Sete Star Sept- Revision of Noise

“Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth. And where, I ask you, can a man escape to, when he hasn’t enough madness left inside him? The truth is an endless death agony. The truth is death. You have to choose: death or lies. I’ve never been able to kill myself.” – Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the End of the Night (1932)

If any of you are at all familiar with my tastes by now, you know that if you but say the words “noisy,” “Japanese” and “grindcore” in the same sentence, I’ll start drooling quicker than Pavlov's pooches at a handbell concert. Therefore, it’s no surprise that as soon as I finished sampling my first Sete Star Sept track and reading some background info, I needed this record.

The band is a Tokyo-based two-piece currently composed of bassist/vocalist Kae and drummer Kiyasu whose sound rests squarely at the mid-point between noise and grindcore. This record serves as the sort of noisegrind gateway drug that Arsedestroyer and Gore Beyond Necropsy were so adept at producing, along with several helpings of traditionalist Japanese grindcore like Carcass Grinder and Gate.

Second track and album standout “Deadly Smile” (found on their Myspace, for those interested in a first listen along with their review) is an excellent introduction to their Japanese-grind-on-an-Arsedestroyer-binge sound, a thirty-six second ball of blasts and shrill, frantic screams akin to mainlining an energy drink in the midst of a bar fight.

“Pearl” opens with killer distorted vocals and proceeds to blast its way into your heart, until it makes the decision to sit on the floor a moment and have itself a breakdown. Thus refreshed, it hops to its feet and proceeds to blast away, except for a cool little riff section that unsurprisingly gets augmented by blasts to close the song.

At times, the noise seems to overpower even the band’s playing ability, certain songs seeming to fall to pieces as you listen. On “Killer,” the song fragments into a mess of feedback-drenched guitar, drum snaps and screaming that re-forms as a Dunwich Horror-on-a-stroll breakdown, gains momentum and rushes back to blurring speeds until it is again smashed apart by its own sheer velocity, this time succumbing to the force and crumbling into a closing half-breakdown.

The fact that the band constantly sound on the verge of losing everything is what makes this release so exciting, however, and although the frenetic blast/slow sustained part/frenetic blast formula can get, well, formulaic, it never gets anywhere close to boring.

While it’s probably not going to convince Rotten Sound/modern Napalm Death straight-arrows that a little noise in your grind never hurt anyone, this release is a perfect introduction to the dirtier, noisier side of grindcore without any of the over-experimental noise-and-yelling fuckery that derails some sloppier noisegrind offerings. It might not make much effort to redefine the genre as we know it (as some 2011 grind releases did), but it does make 15 damned decent arguments for the fact that it's not going anywhere any time soon, either.

Newer Sete Star Sept releases include Gero Me, a 50-track noisefuck with a beautifully grotesque Shintaro Kago manga panel as its cover, and a split with Satan (guess Big Red’s not too busy these days to help out the little guy). Upcoming material includes a split with Penis Geyser. The band have recently been playing shows with the likes of Wormrot, ACxDC and Bloody Phoenix, although a February 12th Japan show seems to be the only current date on the horizon.

Wormrot- Noise EP

As soon as the words “corporate sponsorship” and “grindcore” appear in the same sentence, it’s natural for the punk in all of us to cry foul and start spouting some nonsense about “the Man,” “subjugation” and “ideals.” And to be honest, most of the time, said punk would be absolutely right.

The fact that I find an exception in the partnership between Wormrot and Scion A/V for this EP (as well as those with bands like Gridlink and Harvey Milk for their live series) has little to do with what I think of Scion or their parent company in any corporate terms, and fuck-all to do with the purchase or sale of automobiles. The sole reason rests with the fact that Wormrot (and other bands that Scion A/V has worked with) make great music, and the Scion folks recognize that and know enough to stay the hell out of the way.

One of the few criticisms that have been leveled at this year’s Dirge, Wormrot’s standout sophomore LP and yet another great year-end contender in a year of excellent records, is that there wasn’t a large amount of measurable growth from the band’s breakout 2009 offering, the much-lauded Abuse. Sure, their extensive touring schedule showed in Dirge’s tightness and polish, and there were riffs and blasts galore, but other than some production differences, you could play the two LPs side-by-side and more likely than not miss the changeover.

This EP bucks that trend by offering 5 songs that, while sonic kin to Dirge and clearly born from the jam-based writing style the band tried out on that record, come packed with a shifting bag of sonic tricks that make these some of the most chameleonic yet patently Wormrot songs that the band has released thus far.

Opening the EP is the feedback-soaked freight train punk of “Loathsome Delusions,” a fairly traditional Wormrot grinder that crams speedy, metallic riffage and one of the galloping, three-quarters time punk sections that the band favors into its structure without feeling cramped or forced. Careful listeners (or those who listen to the EP on repeat) will notice that Noise pulls a Finnegan’s Wake move, making the feedback from fifth track “Perpetual Extinction” Ouroboros onto the opening squall of “Loathsome Delusions” for a neat, cyclical effect that’s just one of the many well thought-out decisions the band makes over its 5 minute, 11 second runtime.

Middle track “Outburst of Annoyance” spews thrash-scented riffage all over you, then drops in a circle pit-forming breakdown so that vocalist Arif can get all Shawn Johnson on your ass. As the rest of the bands skanks away, Arif busts out vocal back handsprings and aerials, shifting from several varieties of shouted vocal to growls and highs, sometimes all with the same breath.

The band pulls out all remaining stops for breathtaking closer “Perpetual Extinction.” After a meaty, lightspeed opening, Rasyid and Fitri trick you into saying “Aw fuck, a breakdown?” before laughing their asses off and playing fast again, a trick they pull off in one form or another for a large portion of the song. Next, the band shit on your expectations once again by managing to navigate dropping a thrashy, Iron Maiden-esque lead solo into 30 seconds of the song’s 1:11 run time without a scintilla of cheesiness, which is something I’ve straight-up never seen before in this sort of balls-out grind.

The highest compliment that I can pay to a free release such as this one is to say that I wish that I could buy it, not only so that I could have a physical copy of another of Arif’s consistently amazing album covers (you can find more examples of his fantastic artwork here, including a drawing of H.R. Giger’s classic Alien creature) but because it just is that good. The continuing upward trajectory that the band is on makes me drool for what a third LP would sound like; if it even nears the level of this release, Noisear’s already-finished fourth full-length is going to have stiff album-of-the-year competition in the year to come.

For anyone who hasn't grabbed this slab of digital goodness yet, you can find it here at the Scion A/V site.