Archive for May 2020

When I threw this on, I was expecting the usual low-brow pornogrind bedroom-grade electronic mush. That was what I was signing up for, of course – a brief spell in perversion to send me back to the MySpace days. However, PxOxRxNxOx does things a little differently, at least on this release here. Guitars are virtually nonexistent. The music instead focuses entirely on an electronic aspect, which is entirely typical of this kinda stuff but at…

Chop, slice, wank, repeat. Yeah. London’s finest death metallers expand on their first EP/demo with a longer, more impressive repertoire of songs. Grisly death, macabre subjects, and flaying guitar solos are used in abundance. Killing with class, smashing with… sass? Chopping dat… ass? Yeah. Whatever. I’ve run out of steam fairly quickly on this review. Shit is good. That’s all you need to know.  

Bathory…. Bathory….. Bathory. What can I say about a record that is so influential to the black metal worlds? Copies of this have sold on Discogs for up to £1600, which should say a lot for its influence and historical value. However, how does Bathory’s self titled sound? This is proto black metal through and through. It’s not as NWOBHM as say, Venom, whose album helped cement the term ‘Black Metal’, but aurally, this is…

This is so awful that in some ways it is rather genius, if I can say so myself. Recorded all the way back in 2014 and put out online by noise label Red Venice, the aim of Panties was to create a pornogrind imitation that was entirely synthetic. Electrotribalistic Pornitorium, for better or worse, achieves this, being an entirely synthetic record that I recorded on my Sony Xperia Z1 phone. Vocals? Nah fam, that’s just…

Like A Lamb To The Slaughter was the short-lived original direction of my Panties project. It had such a simple name that I couldn’t get out of my head, I had to try and make some noise that was oppressive and fetishistic (is that a word?) to accompany and suit the name. I’m sure others who revel in the pits of noise music have these same itches right? Like, the name comes first, and then…

Chainsaw Dismemberment almost seems like a “part 2” to the legendary Hacked Up For BBQ record. It has almost identical production, and even a very similar set of samples and vibes (there are some samples from the same movies, although I am not an expert in this department and cannot really clarify all that further). It would perhaps do Mortician an injustice if I was to say that there was more of the same on…

Once again it is giallo o’clock here at Lines In Wax. The Case Of The Bloody Iris is a slightly awkward and clumsy romp through the sexually-charged early 70s as our titular heroine Jennifer is hunted by a madman living in a block of flats. There lot’s of skin and artsy murder mystery stylings that you would expect from such a title. The pacing is a little off, but overall it is fairly strong and…

XX was the record that began my love affair with the bizarre world of Mushroomhead. It may be a re-issue of older material, which is presented here in various forms of remixed, remastered and completely re-recorded states, but to most if not all Mushroomhead fans outside of the USA, this was the first encounter. My favourite band was Slipknot, so when I was 12 years old, surely you can understand why I gravitated towards bands…

Going back to Brutally Mutilated after all these years, the first thing that I notice is how bright and tight the guitar tone is. Say what you want about Mortician, whether you love them or loathe them, their music is mostly a garbled mush of intense death brutality. Here, the songs almost sparkle in comparison! Haha! It’s a nice change of pace and a breath of fresh air. The drums almost sound real, but I…

If you watch the Scum Story documentary from the 20th anniversary disc (sigh) – which should have really been called the Mick Harris story – and can still muster up enough interest in proceedings after listening to a bunch of talking heads verbally excreting endless fucking shite for 50 minutes, you’ll have noticed that Mick categorically says that Scum should not be fucked with. I wonder then, what he would make not only of the…

Ridin’ across the planes on a mincehorse, right? I always assumed the name was some sort of word play for heroin, but who knows? This record slays, and that’s all that matters. Archagathus have a strong output ethic, and this full length is a solid milestone in their catalog; 20 odd minutes of stomping mince, blasting grind and slurry gore vokillz.

The End Of All Things To Come was released around the time that nu-metal began to tank in the mainstream, so although I enjoyed the single off of this, I totally snoozed on the record as a whole. Let’s be honest too, as much as I loved LD.50, I was far too immature at 12 years old to really dig (geddit?) what Mudvayne was doing at the time. Mudvayne have always had a serious musical…

If there’s a bummer to Mortician’s discography, then it has to be Zombie Apocalypse. It’s not that the songs are particularly bad – in all honesty they sound pretty much like every other session (lol) – it’s actually to do with the production. On Zombie Apocalypse, it seems like the bass police visited the studio during mixing and sucked all fucking low end out of this thing. All the gruesome pieces are in the right…

Metal Pussy is a 20-minute or so EP from French (I think?) techno project Popof. I wouldn’t say that the record is particularly ground breaking, but the warm sound of the vinyl press works well with the project’s slightly distorted and over-driven (unintentional, I’d say) techno beats. Don’t ask me what that artwork and name is about, though. 

Nowadays, thanks to the wonders of technology, if you want to see Jane Fonda’s tits you can just do a quick Google search. Unfortunately for folk back in the 60s, it meant having to sit through absolute garbage like Barbarella. I’ve tried hard to find some merit in this low budget, camp as hell sci-fi romp. Truly, I have. Sure, its better than OG Star Trek, and watching Barbarella sleep her way across the galaxy…

Who’d have thought a sleazy sci-fi b-movie would include cast members that would go on to be in shit like Coronation Street? Yes! Welcome to the world of Inseminoid, a terribly low budget sci-fi horror where a female…. astronaut? Scientist? Whatever!? – Anyway she gets inseminated by alien semen and goes berzerk. Plot! The best thing about Inseminoid however is the acting, or lack thereof. The entire cast showcases a unified level of ineptitude that…

The ironic thing is that a doc about a genre that relies so heavily on speed turned out to be the slowest production in the history of time. Fuck, I have been waiting absolutely years for this thing to come out. So much so in fact, that I had completely forgotten that the whole fucking thing existed. Roll on to the COVID crisis of 2020, and the film maker has been an absolute legend and…

As influential and praised that Assück are, they’ve never really struck a chord with me. That of course is not to say that Misery Index isn’t a ripping sonic tornado of a record (is it a full length at 15 minutes in length?), I’ve just never really resonated with Assück on a level that I do with a lot of other grindcore.

By the time Beautiful Stories dropped in 2010 I’d lost most if not all interest in what was once my favourite band. I remember my mate Pip played it in his car and it seemed like more of the same badly mixed, lazy, phoned in redneck metal with keyboards. However, I’m not sure if it’s because the band has fallen even further into a pit of absolute cess in recent times, but I can now…

This was a random spin for me, but I gotta be honest, I absolutely loved it. My limited experience with Prong had them pegged as a hardcore/thrash kinda crossover with industrial tones. Power Of The Damager however, is a hard hitting metal release through and through. Its all about the dry, bludgeoning riffs, and macho delivery. Its very 101, but its a super heavy record.

I am fairly unfamiliar with Prong, only having heard the name being dropped in every now and then. Force Fed kinda sounds to me like DRI crossed with a very subtle industrial bent; that driving, slightly rigid approach to metal counter acting the hardcore / trash style jams. I didn’t fall in love with this but I enjoyed it all the same.

Dragontown was the Alice record that was out when I first got into him. My dad had been a fan for donkey’s years, but when we finally went to see my first ever live show together (the 2002 UK arena version of Monsters Of Rock), Alice was touting Dragontown. I had fond memories, but I was expecting this to suck. It doesn’t. Sure, there are some absolute floaters here – fillers than curse any hard…

If you thought Toxie 2 was bad, I’d stay the fuck away from this. Patched together from footage taken in the same sessions as Part II, Part III makes no effort to conceal the fact that a lot of its plot makes absolutely zero narrative sense after the conclusion of the second movie. But hey, this is Troma, it is what it is. Toxie gets a job with the organisation he destroys in part 2…

You’d think things couldn’t get much worse than the original Toxie right? Ha! I am infinitely impressed by how low the bar has been set by this first sequel (I cannot begin to imagine 3 and 4) but nevertheless some odd part of me wants me to soldier on through. Apparently Troma acquired a bunch of funding from Japan so set this film there to appease those backers, which makes for some amusing scenarios (plus…

A pointless but massively entertaining 7” that came out alongside From Enslavement To Obliteration. In fact, these tracks ended up on the Scum + FETO two albums on one CD release. The opening track seems to be a variation on the track “Evolved As One”, but the record is worth listening to for “Musclehead”, “Dead” and the “Morbid Deceiver” tracks alone.

This is an absolutely stunning giallo movie (if one can use such a way to describe a movie of this nature), where the best tropes of the sleazy Italian genre are taken to create a sexy bright-red-blood fest of unexplainable deaths. The plot? Very, very sexy ladies are getting butchered by a mysterious masked assailant clad in leather. I won’t spoil the ending, but what a journey. Aesthetically mesmerizing, but plays out like a gory…

God is a fucking mad trip, mate. Kevin Martin (The Bug), JK Broadrick (Godflesh, Jesu) team up with a whole host of other musicians (I’m sorry for not listing them all!) to create an absolute mindfuck of a record. Possession was my first brush with God (what a sentence), after meaning to check them out for donkey’s years. On first impressions it comes across like a blend of earlier, dubbed-out industrial Scorn records and something…

I caught Swans on their final tour and was very disappointed to find that they had run out of copies of this hand made gem before the date I attended. Since then, I have been slowly but surely telling myself “one day, one day” but lets be honest, I’m never going to pay Discogs collectors prices to silly pricks who are just tryna scalp me. So, I’m afraid, I have gone against Gira’ wishes and…

I did have some big brain review of this written up where I explained that The Sciences was like a theme park version of Sleep’s music, how they’ve become almost derivative of their own work and that The Sciences, whilst on the surface is a well written, performed and produced record, it could have been made by anyone, and lacks any unique charm or statement. Unfortunately however, for the first time in Lines In Wax…