TITLES: H

HAIR POLICE s/t CD $13.98 Hospital Productions

Compiling the out of print Hospital cassette, Mortuary Servants EP, and adding new mud/noise constructions from the Drawn Dead sessions, Hair Police spurt twisted, drugged out downer noise and snarling feedback murk all over your goods. 5 tracks of hyper distorto penetration from Lexington, KY, that we at Crucial Blast have been loving. Brutal noise heads will be all over this, along with anyone into the blurt rock of Wolf Eyes, Burmese, and early Black Dice.

HAIR POLICE Constantly Terrified CD $11.98 Troubleman

A thoroughly satisfying bout of crushing basement scum/dirge/racket from Hair Police circa 2005. The Lexington, KY trio of Robert Beatty, Mike Connelly (also of Wolf Eyes) and Trevor Tremaine navigate destroyed noise rock jams through eruptions of overloaded analogue electronics and random percussive clatter. Hair Police is one of those bands that always gets tagged with the "noise" label, but this is way more than just noise...this is a fucked up, satanic splatterpunk version of free improv, as guitar, bass, drums, oscillators and tapes congeal into a sticky, pungent mass fused to the brutal un-rock of bands like Burmese and Wolf Eyes (whose John Olson appears on the title track to lay down some face ripping saxophone) and jammed through a chain of 100 broken-down turntables all playing warped copies of a haunted house soundtrack album. Formless guitar noise wraps itself around threatening tone loops and horrific time-stretched screams of anguish rippling out of the basement. Sub-metal bass vomit stalks along the floor and mindless trashcan blastbeats teeter over on their side. This shit rocks HARD. Gnarly times, indeed. Comes in a monotone digipack. Highly recommended.

HAIR POLICE Prescribed Burning LP $16.98 Hospital Productions
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Ensconced in a silky silkscreened heavy black sleeve covered in amorphous, abstracted shadows, Hair Police's Prescribed Burning is a new vinyl edition of the limited edition CD-R of the same name that was released on Gods Of Tundra earlier in 2006. This dope vinyl release is equally low-run, limited to 600 copies, and it's a killer slab of haunted deathpulse from the Hair Police trio that's spread out across six untitled tracks. They start off the A side (identified by the word "Gnarly" etched into the matrix) with a smeared set of shadowy dungeon drones, drifting feedback tones, and creepy metallic clatter, sounding like fugitive thugs bumping around the practice room in the dark at 2am in the morning, emitting a nightmarish, desolate ambient threat. The second side (marked with "Times" in the matrix) picks things up with a boisterous noise rock spasm, mashing broken guitars and crushing sludge noise with a deafening wall of sheet-metal avalanche, but then fades into a blackness inhabited by circular metal loops, pulsating bass guitar, anguished smeared moans, and glacial feedback drift. Brutal basement creepout.

HAIR POLICE Constantly Terrified LP $11.98 Troubleman
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

A thoroughly satisfying bout of crushing basement scum/dirge/racket from Hair Police circa 2005. The Lexington, KY trio of Robert Beatty, Mike Connelly (also of Wolf Eyes) and Trevor Tremaine navigate destroyed noise rock jams through eruptions of overloaded analogue electronics and random percussive clatter. Hair Police is one of those bands that always gets tagged with the "noise" label, but this is way more than just noise...this is a fucked up, satanic splatterpunk version of free improv, as guitar, bass, drums, oscillators and tapes congeal into a sticky, pungent mass fused to the brutal un-rock of bands like Burmese and Wolf Eyes (whose John Olson appears on the title track to lay down some face ripping saxophone) and jammed through a chain of 100 broken-down turntables all playing warped copies of a haunted house soundtrack album. Formless guitar noise wraps itself around threatening tone loops and horrific time-stretched screams of anguish rippling out of the basement. Sub-metal bass vomit stalks along the floor and mindless trashcan blastbeats teeter over on their side. This shit rocks HARD. Gnarly times, indeed. Highly recommended.

HAIR POLICE Strict 7" EP $5.98 Troubleman Unlimited

Killer new limited edition 7" single that rocks two exclusive Hair Police jams, in feverish anticipation of their new upcoming full length album that's due sometime in spring/summer '07. Members Mike Connelly (also of Wolf Eyes), Robert Beatty and Trevor Tremaine summon two untitled jams on Strict, the a-side blazing electronic black-vomit nightmares and heavy propulsive percussive noize rock fug splattered with distortion and drug effects, and the b-side starts out by diving into a pool of grisly sheet-metal ambience that sounds like Tobe Hooper's music concrete score for the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre being performed by wheezing subhumanoids, then downshifts into a slow-burning field of hateful amplifier hum and brutal metal scraping. These dudes get heavier every time; I can only hope that their next album is gonna continue to tap into this formless blackened hardcore aggression. The 7" comes in a distressed white glued sleeve with a warped photo collage on the cover, and black paint smears and minimal text on the back. Limited edition of 1,000.

HAISHA / MIZUKO split CD $4.98 Crucial Blast

A meeting of two demented forces from the filthiest gutters of Los Angeles.HAISHA opens with a seriously grotesque noisecore/grind/trash hybrid, powered by jackhammer drum machines and miles of bad fucking attitude. Think early EARACHE grindcore, japanese trashpunk a la CONFUSE, and hardcore gabba smashed up in a crystal meth milkshake. Things only get worse when MIZUKO follow up with event-driven found sound ,grisly power electronics,and queasy death industrial that is misanthropic to its very core. Black transmissions from a rotting planet, unleashed on an unsuspecting ghost world. Presented in a sleek glossy gatefold package.

HALF JAPANESE Hello CD $9.98 Alternative Tentacles

Cool, bent indie-pop from the legendary Jad Fair. Hello is another fine addition to the prolific Half Japanese discography, loaded with shambling pop, propulsive rhythms, simple little songs that are amazingly profound for all their haiku-like garage sensibilities. It's really idiosyncratic, loopy, and unique, with all sorts of weird little sounds and instrumentation popping up out of nowhere. I can see where Pavement would have gotten much of their aesthete from, seeing as how Half Japanese and Jad have been doing this since the late 70's!

HALF MAKESHIFT Aphotic Leech CD $13.98 Utech Records

I was blown away by this debut from Half Makeshift, not only because it's one of the more interesting variations on free-floating, ambient doom I've heard in recent days, but also because it's the project of a guy that lives virtually right down the road from Crucial Blast, and who has been one of our fervent customers! I knew that Nathan Michael was engaged in different sound projects, but I had no idea about his Half makeshift project until I stumbled across some music online when 20 Buck Spin first announced that they were going to be releasing a new album from him. Further digging revealed this initial release on the Utech label, a 35 minute disc, one track, where Nathan crafts an amazing nocturnal dronescape out of crackling feedback, austere piano figures, fragments of strings, glitchy electronic grit, and deep, crushing powerchord sludge, almost like a meeting between William Basinski and Corrupted's Llenandose de Gusanos. Aphotic Leech is mysterious and evocative, beginning with crackling static and electronic shards breaking apart in an empty soundfield that is slowly filled with the ringing notes of a piano, it's notes forming a sad, elegiac melody that floats above what sound like xylophone tones and a thunderous distant rumbling that is slowly consumed by rust. As the peice progresses, the distressed electronics, crumbling drones and distorted rumbles become more prominent, sometimes threatening to consume the clusters of piano notes altogether; it's not until almost 12 minutes into the track that the first monstrous powerchord appears, a thundercrack of black doom that splits the sky. By the time we reach the last half of Aphotic Leech, we're plunged into a dread filled sludgescape of grinding, in-the-red doom metal riffs so distorted that they seem to crack and dissolve more and more each time the riff repeats, while machine noises, plaintive piano, and fractured glitches all swirl together into a black roar. A truly amazing debut, and I still can't believe that this album actually came from around here - the Western Maryland area isn't really known for producing avant-doom albums like this! Dark and abstract, Half Makeshift swims in the inky depths with artists like Bohren und der Club of Gore, Black Boned Angel, Mrtyu! and Sunn O))), but the use of electronics here is unlike anything I've heard before. Great packaging too, presented in a striking foldover jacket printed in gold, black, and grey, the back cover depicting a gruseome photo from Max Aguilera-Hellweg that depicts a surreal figure like something out of an Adam Jones video, the front cover a black-toned jellyfish, and the disc attached to the interior sleeve by a plastic hub. Highly recommended !!!
MP3 SAMPLE: "Aphotic Leech" (excerpt)

HALF OF ZERO Number Of The Least CD $9.98 Goatsicle

10 song debut from this Colorado instrumental sludge rock band. Another cool new find that was introduced to us by Conan at Game Two, this trio construct epic, melodic stoner crush with huge monolithic riffs and thunderous drumming, a soundtrack for a Godzilla movie set in the deep south. HALF OF ZERO avoids boring repetition by pulling out a variety of riffs and constantly changing dynamics; for fans of Karma To Burn, Bongzilla and Stinking Lizaveta.

HALF ROUNDED BASTARD FILE s/t LP $9.98 Primary Thoughts

Debut LP from this interesting Portland trio. Mostly instrumental, this band excels at a peculiar brand of garage sludge pop, comparable to early NIRVANA meets JAWBREAKER? Damaged, infectious stuff. Equally jangly, reflective,and crushing. Super slick silkscreened sleeve with inserts.ON CLEAR VINYL!

HALO Body Of Light CD $13.98 Relapse

Body Of Light, the second full-length from Aussie dronepunk nihilists HALO, continues to evolve the sub-bass dirge precision of early SWANS and Streetcleaner-era GODFLESH into an even bleaker, more crushing soundform. Despite the fact that Halo are solely comprised of bass guitar and drums, the duo create a totally suffocating miasma of ultra-downtuned bass strings, dense feedback, apocalyptic drone, and some very pissed off and tortured vocals and lyrics. Anti-corporate, anti-music, these guys mean business. A yawning black maw of bottomless drone crust.

HALO MANASH Par-Antra I:Vir CD $11.98 Aural Hypnox

Dense, nightmarish riitual drift from this Finnish project, another killer black-ambient release from those masters of pitch-black hum at Aural Hypnox. The first part of the Par-Antra trilogy, Vir consists of nine highly detailed dronescapes populated with doomy chants, distant slave-drums, howling sheets of midnight drone sculpted from e-bowed guitar feedback and analog synthesizers, as well as windbones and cosmic electronics. Organic and gorgeous, utterly sinister and intensely detailed shamanic drone. Over an hour of cthulhian ritual thrum. Comes packaged in an A5 eight-page black & white booklet illustrated with starnge and arcane images that fittingly accompany the esoteric music of HALO MANASH. Limited to 1000 copies. Highly recommended to fans of LUSTMORD,YEN POX,SCHLOSS TEGAL, TROUM's darker moments,and the cavernous moan of CORRUPTED's drift/drone material.

HALO MANASH Syoma CD $11.98 Aural Hypnox

The third full length from Finnish drone shaman HALO MANASH, who creates dark and forbidding ambient fields populated with evolving guitar drones, dynamic ritualistic percussion & reverberating gongs/chimes/bells, chanting vocalizations, various windbones / experimental instruments, and analog synthesizers. An hour long descent into pitch black cave-hum. Amazing deep and multi-layered thrum and howl, that starts off like a combo of LUSTMORD's "Place Where The Black Stars Hang" and the 20 minute long "Pure2" from GODFLESH's Pure, and gets increasingly more cthulhian and cavernous. Ancient, menacing, gorgeous dronescapes. For fans of midnight guitar density along the lines of the darker output from TROUM and MAEROR TRI, and the subterranean drift of LUSTMORD and YEN POX.Comes packaged in a six panel gatefold sleeve with evocative silver-ink silkscreen printing, and limited to 1000 copies.

HANATARASH 3 CD-R $8.98 RRRecords

This is an official RRR-reissued CD-R of the 1990 CD (also originally released on RRR) from legendary Japanese noise-chaos-garbage-attack project Hanatarash, which featured Yamatka Eye from the BOREDOMS. Before the Boredoms, Yamatsuka was the prime mover in (and eventually the sole member of) the Hanatarash, a post-Einstürzende Neubauten exercise in power-tool abuse and tape manipulation. Subtitled William Bennett Has No Dick, this is as confrontational and over the top as anything else in the Hanatarash ouvre, but also sports some amazing beautiful sequences in between all of Yamataka Eye's brain-blasting electronic cut-up. This album is primarily composed of old rarities and much sought-after tracks from the time of the first Hanatarashi LP on Alchemy. Short bursts of psychotic machine noises, submerged scum-industrial grind, and brutal junk attacks, all cut up into a complete psycho freakout, a conducted tsunami of loops, screams, feedback, slowed down records and Christian Marclay -styled turntable deconstruction, noisecore mayhem, sound collage and just flat out noise. Totally genius. The CD-R comes in a RRR style wallet sleeve.

HAPPY NEW YEAR Live From The Back Part Of The Flag CD $11.98 Amanita

Bererk free-jazz noise splatter from Ron Anderson (MOLECULES),drummer/vocalist Glenn Aorvisto (ex WOO),and 99 Hooker on electrified sax, recorded live across France in 1995 (with one track recorded in San Francisco). The trio gets epileptic with 15 improvised panic attacks, sometimes slipping into a narcoleptic dirge, but mostly blaring away, bright technicolor smears of trumpet and sax dueling backed by stretched-out tape sludge, retardo bass guitar squiggle, and grunting,ranting, totally incoherent vocals. This album actually pretty much heads straight into total noisecore territory for the most part, but driven by Anderson's spastic sax blurt, and there is some actual muscianship at work here, so it's not just full-on blasting chaos. More like drowsy Anal Cunt jamming with an overcaffeinated Albert Ayler. Thoroughly absurd hyperkinetic jazz/prog/noise that fits right between your Flying Luttenbachers and Ruins discs.

HARD TO SWALLOW self titled CD $11.98 Armageddon

So glad we got this in! I was really into this UK band several years ago, when they released an album called Protected By The Ejaculation Of Serpents, which took the powerviolence/extreme hardcore formula that was so popular at the time and twisted it into sick new shapes, creating something like EYEHATEGOD meets CROSSED OUT with a weird, sort of experimental element to their songs. I loved that album, but could never find any of their other stuff until Ben from DROPDEAD made things happen with this much-needed release of their mid-90's studio material. This collects demo, compilation and EP tracks circa 1995/1996. This stuff is so brutal and unflinchingly violent...imagine the hyperfast, ultra pissed off hardcore of INFEST at 700 mph, but breaking into and throwing in all of these cool little breaks and elements, like total rock n' roll leads and flourishes, big beastly stoner rock rave ups, weird quiet melodic parts, crushing doom riffs, and more. Really inventive, and fairly complex. Vocal-wise, this is totally out of control, with two guys doing this murderous call-and-response shriek/roar. Awesome. The HARD TO SWALLOW members lineup reads like a who's who of UK extreme music, going on to either form or join bands like Electric Wizard, Iron Monkey, Helvis, Teeth Of Lions Rule The Divine, Dukes Of Nothing, and John Holmes.

HARLOTS This Is The Second Death CD $14.98 Corrosive

The second album from Harlots delivers more of their harsh, progressive, style-mashing metalcore from this group consisting of both former and current members of Today Is The Day, Dead To Fall, Kenoma, and Eyes Upon Seperation. Spread out across the American midwest (well, Ohio and Indiana), Harlots combine intense, technical progressive metal with post-rock ambience into dizzying complex arrangements; the lyrics are pure armageddon poetry, and the band displays immense instrumental prowess via a whirlwind of brutal, dizzying tech riffs, strained, seething vocals, multi-instrumental noodlings (violins and ambient noise, anyone?) and controlled-chaos drumming. The album opens with the one-two punch of "These Are The Paths That We Choose" and "These Are The Paths That We Create", with fierce galloping tech-metalcore made up of ever changing riffs, frantic fretboard runs and brutal breakdowns with segues into haunting melodies and distant clean singing, and eruptions of total Soilent Green style grind-sludge riffage. But then the brutal metalcore attack suddenly shifts into "Moment Of Desperation", a haunting dronescape of backwards guitars and processed noise and what sounds like the rumbling of a passing train, which quickly merges into "Those Days Seem Several Hundred Years Ago", an amazingly beautiful piece of instrumental metallic post rock, complete with lush strings and an emotional piano melody that builds into crushing metal dirge, finally morphing into a unsettling stop-start closing riff that shuts the song down abruptly. It's one of the most powerful songs on the album, a strange yet effective blend of heavier Explosions In The Sky with Converge-like metallic HC. "Remote Coagulation" follows, a blasting tech-metal offensive with frenzied, crushing, chugging riffs that coalesce into something that sounds vaguely like part of the old Twilight Zone theme, then shifts gears into a brief passage of epic ambient metal, then back into spastic technical shreddery, before closing the song out with killer Swedish-style death metal. Then "Moment Of Sickness" begins with slow-changing clusters of melodic guitar feedback, crackling textures, and gorgeous electronic ambience, like something from Growing or Labradford or some other heavenly, Kranky Records style drone rock outfit, drifting dreamiliy for over 9 minutes until it erupts into the melodic death metal of "Asceticism" and "War Of The Great City". The albums closes out with "Fall Of The Matriarch", another epic instrumental a la Explosions In The Sky that builds to a crushing ambient metal climax with pummeling drums and speed metal shredding. This is one of the coolest metalcore albums I've heard lately, a mashup of crazed Cryptopsy tech-grind, Between The Buried And Me's technical metalcore gymnastics, huge ambient rockscapes a la Explosions In The Sky and Sigur Ros, Isis/Neurosis dirge, Don Caballero's epic math rock instrumentals, and the apocalyptic paranoia of later-era Today Is The Day. The diverse background of the members previous projects really comes together into something new and highly creative, and this album is highly recommended to anyone looking for something different from the metalcore genre.

HARVEY MILK Anthem DVD + 3" CD $28.98 Chunklet
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Anthem is a beautifully assembled live document from Harvey Milk, packaged together with a 3" CD of additional unreleased music. Harvey Milk are greatly loved here at Crucial Blast, their sometimes monstrous, sometimes fragile indie-sludge has entranced us ever since we were turned on to them with the Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men album. Their sound seems to draw from a weird combination of heartrendingly beautiful Codeine-esque slow-core melodies, ultra heavy, crushing sludge metal, ripping stoner rock raveups, and quirky post-punk/math rock type stuff, but the end product sounds pretty much unlike anything else out there. Harvey Milk totally predated the newish wave of crushing heavy melodic sludge, the sort played by bands like Floor and Jesu, and fans of those bands that haven't heard Harvey Milk yet are really missing out.
The Anthem set features a DVD containing three and a half hours of live footage from the band that spans their existence from their first shows in 1993 to the recent run of reunion shows, and the quality is excellent, with almost all of the footage shot on broadcast-quality cameras. The hightlight of this DVD however is the Atlanta show from 1994 where Creston alternately pounds an anvil with a sledgehammer and bellows into the mic, the anvil hits ringing in time with the rest of the band. Awesome.The accompanying 3" disc contains the four unreleased live songs, all later-period style stoner rock crushers, except for the last song, a dreamy, jangly, reverb soaked cover of R.E.M.'s "South Central Rain".
And then there's the awesome package design by Stephen O'Malley of Sunn O)))/Khanate, an olive DVD-case sized foldover sleeve with an abstract diecut and silver embossed lettering that folds out to reveal a two-part folder printed in silver metallic ink that has the discs attached to hubs on the interior folder, and extensive liner notes by Chunklet Magazine publisher Henry Owings. Amazing.
The DVD is NTSC Region 0. Released in a one-time pressing of 1,000 copies. Absolutely essential for fans of the glorious heaviosity that is Harvey Milk.

HARVEY MILK War b/w The Old Revolution 7" EP $6.98 Troubleman

A special limited-edition 7" single companion piece that was released more-or-less in tandem with the brand new Harvey Milk album, Special Wishes. The A-side is the awesome, 40-ton "War", the second track off the album, a megaheavy doomdirge with Harvey Milk's signature off-kilter rhythms and husky, bellowing vocals. Same version that's on the album, but for fellow Harvey Milk fanatics like us, this 7" is essential for the B-side, a heartbreaking acoustic cover of Leonard Cohen's "The Old Revolution". One time pressing of 1,000 copies.

HARVEY MILK Special Wishes CD $11.98 Megablade

Man, I have been feverishly waiting for this one. I fell in love with Harvey Milk when I first heard the Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men album on Tumult years ago, and since then have been eagerly picking up all of the recent re-issued singles collections put out by Relapse and Escape Artist, landing fantastic fan-traded cd-rs from fellow Harvey Milk fans, and rocking that awesome Anthem DVD that came out last month for about a week straight on the PC here in the Crucial Blast office. And every incarnation of the band that I could fill my skull with has crushed me, from the quirky ultraheavy sludge beauty of their mid-90's releases to the jacked-up, ZZ Top channeling stoner blitz of their late-decade material. So we're talking about one of my favorite bands, ever. But what I really needed, was really waiting for, was a new Harvey Milk album, and here we have it, Special Wishes, a nine song resurrection from the reformed trio, that might just be the album of the year, but in any event is one of the best albums Harvey Milk has created in their career.
Opening with the bone-shaking sludge of "I've Got A Love", "War", and "Crush Them All", Harvey Milk crashes in like the Melvins on ludes, ridiculously heavy and glacial with gigantic doom metal / math-rock riffs lurching sideways and burly howling vocals dripping with lyrics like diary writings, all possessed by a syrupy Southern rock vibe that feels deeply wrong. Total dirge/sludge pulverization that flattens you over and over again. And just when the band has rolled over you for the umpteenth time with those awesome gooey sludge riffs, they break into "Once In A While", a leaden Southern rock / pop anthem with a soaring chorus hook to die for, super catchy but still really heavy as acoustic guitars and Creston's beautiful, burned out singing are backed up by crashing drums and sludgy guitar distortion. Then comes "Instrumental", a three and a half minute throatless workout of confounding prog/math rock contortionism delivered at pulverizing sludgecore density, like Eyehategod taking a stab at a Don Caballero jam. That's followed by "The End", one of the most beautiful and crushing songs on the album, starting off as dreamy slow core that reminds me of Codeine and Low with unexpected, but absolutely spellbinding multi-part vocal harmonies, before melting down into crushing sludge rock that sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd but 100 times heavier, with a soaring guitar lead that cuts right through your soul and into a bombastic chorus. Next is "Love Swing", another monstrous, trance inducing sludge crusher with a killer catchy pop hook and crushing riffs flowing like molasses. So freaking AWESOME. Then comes "Old Glory", one of the best songs from Harvey Milk ever, a total surprise at first when the folksy, fingerpicked acoustic guitar appears, a smokey ode to the nation's flag and battlefields and marching drums, but then the band drops in with massive sludgy guitars and a searing classic rock solo and continues the Lynyrd Skynyrd vibe that has haunted the second half of the album while raising it to even more epic heights. The album closes out with "Mother's Day", which begins with a heartbreaking old-time melody played on pipe organs and violin, like some sad and hopeful piece of Americana, but then explodes into a triumphant sludgy pop-metal jam, all harmonizing guitars and sugary hair metal ballad hooks and slow, dirgey riffage and Creston's beautifully hushed, damaged singing. So totally amazing and perfect, a majestic combination of crushing metallic heaviness and indie-rock melodicism and general cough-syrup chugging weirdness, but surprisingly accessible. This is definitely one of our favorite albums of 2006. Highly, highly recommended.

HARVEY MILK Special Wishes 2xLP $19.98 Megablade

Here is the double-LP, gatefold vinyl version of the amazing new Harvey Milk album, on black vinyl.
Man, I have been feverishly waiting for this one. I fell in love with Harvey Milk when I first heard the Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men album on Tumult years ago, and since then have been eagerly picking up all of the recent re-issued singles collections put out by Relapse and Escape Artist, landing fantastic fan-traded cd-rs from fellow Harvey Milk fans, and rocking that awesome Anthem DVD that came out last month for about a week straight on the PC here in the Crucial Blast office. And every incarnation of the band that I could fill my skull with has crushed me, from the quirky ultraheavy sludge beauty of their mid-90's releases to the jacked-up, ZZ Top channeling stoner blitz of their late-decade material. So we're talking about one of my favorite bands, ever. But what I really needed, was really waiting for, was a new Harvey Milk album, and here we have it, Special Wishes, a nine song resurrection from the reformed trio, that might just be the album of the year, but in any event is one of the best albums Harvey Milk has created in their career.
Opening with the bone-shaking sludge of "I've Got A Love", "War", and "Crush Them All", Harvey Milk crashes in like the Melvins on ludes, ridiculously heavy and glacial with gigantic doom metal / math-rock riffs lurching sideways and burly howling vocals dripping with lyrics like diary writings, all possessed by a syrupy Southern rock vibe that feels deeply wrong. Total dirge/sludge pulverization that flattens you over and over again. And just when the band has rolled over you for the umpteenth time with those awesome gooey sludge riffs, they break into "Once In A While", a leaden Southern rock / pop anthem with a soaring chorus hook to die for, super catchy but still really heavy as acoustic guitars and Creston's beautiful, burned out singing are backed up by crashing drums and sludgy guitar distortion. Then comes "Instrumental", a three and a half minute throatless workout of confounding prog/math rock contortionism delivered at pulverizing sludgecore density, like Eyehategod taking a stab at a Don Caballero jam. That's followed by "The End", one of the most beautiful and crushing songs on the album, starting off as dreamy slow core that reminds me of Codeine and Low with unexpected, but absolutely spellbinding multi-part vocal harmonies, before melting down into crushing sludge rock that sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd but 100 times heavier, with a soaring guitar lead that cuts right through your soul and into a bombastic chorus. Next is "Love Swing", another monstrous, trance inducing sludge crusher with a killer catchy pop hook and crushing riffs flowing like molasses. So freaking AWESOME. Then comes "Old Glory", one of the best songs from Harvey Milk ever, a total surprise at first when the folksy, fingerpicked acoustic guitar appears, a smokey ode to the nation's flag and battlefields and marching drums, but then the band drops in with massive sludgy guitars and a searing classic rock solo and continues the Lynyrd Skynyrd vibe that has haunted the second half of the album while raising it to even more epic heights. The album closes out with "Mother's Day", which begins with a heartbreaking old-time melody played on pipe organs and violin, like some sad and hopeful piece of Americana, but then explodes into a triumphant sludgy pop-metal jam, all harmonizing guitars and sugary hair metal ballad hooks and slow, dirgey riffage and Creston's beautifully hushed, damaged singing. So totally amazing and perfect, a majestic combination of crushing metallic heaviness and indie-rock melodicism and general cough-syrup chugging weirdness, but surprisingly accessible. This is definitely one of our favorite albums of 2006. Highly, highly recommended.

HARVEY MILK The Kelley Sessions CD $15.98 Escape Artist

In the wake of the resurgance of deserved interest in Harvey Milk, this collection of tracks recorded by the Athens, Georgia-based band in the middle of the 1990's is one of the more esoteric releases in their catalog. The Kelly Sessions is not so much a full length album as it is a collection of long lost alternate recordings captured around the time that the band was constructing their 1997 magnum opus Courtesy and Good Will Toward Men. Four songs on The Kelley Sessions would appear on Courtesy in different form, but the other five tracks are previously unreleased, and all of these recordings are exclusive to this release, making it an essential for Harvey Milk fans. The disc opens with “My Broken Heart Will Never Mend”, a bludgeoning assault of monstrously downtuned math-rock, which moves into "Dick Slaters" awesome slo-mo indie rock, dunked in tar, screwed and chopped, glacially slow and beautifully melodic. 'Brown Water', 'Dating Pressure', 'Blackbeard' and 'Plastic Eggs' are all punishing, planet-crushing exercises, equal parts Slint and Melvins and Jesus Lizard but way more fucked up and syrupy and slooow, with serpentine sludgecore riffs that are heavier than God, and incredible melodies buried under the bands winding doominess, over which Creston Spiers howls some of the most damaged and distinctive vocals in indie heaviness. 'Come And Spit' is Harvey Milk in full-on rock and roll mode, still crushingly heavy and unstoppably catchy but possessed by the sort of adrenalized boogie that would make up their 2000 swan song The Pleaser. The last track, "Anthem", is a heartbreakingly beautiful acoustic song that'll stick with you long after this has stopped spinning. A crucial compliment to the recent Harvey Milk re-issues and the new Special Wishes album, and a clear precursor to the sludgy, uber-heavy metallic indie crush currently championed by bands like Torche, Isis, Floor, and Jesu. Released in a limited edition of 2000.

HARVEY MILK / HAYRIDE Fuck You Guys split 7” $8.98 Superfluous Umlaut
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

Just a couple of months ago, there was a flurry of Harvey Milk activity that was a windfall for fans of the cult sludge rock outfit, including the awesome new album Special Wishes, the DVD and 3" CD set Anthem, the Relapse re-issue of Courtesy And Good Will Toward Men, and a couple of live shows on the East Coast (none of which were anywhere close to C-Blast HQ. C'mon!). And somewhere in there during that spate of new releases and re-issues in Fall 2006, there appeared this brand new 7" from Harvey Milk, a split with their Athens pals Hayride, with whome HM had previously shared another split 7" with back in the early 90's, which was called Pals Forever. Released in a tiny pressing of 300 copies in a full color sleeve, and titled Fuck You Guys, the Harvey Milk / Hayride split rocks one unreleased exclusive jam from each band. As we'd expect, Harvey Milk flatten their side with "Hell Toupee", a nearly six minute sludge riot that the band recorded on a four track at home in 1991. A lo-fi, angular sludgecore anthem, with killer demented bluesy soloing and monstrously detuned Melvins-ish riffage, Creston's wailing singing buried in the fuzz, a slow motion avalanche of mathy crunch. This song doesn't appear anywhere else in the Harvey Milk discography, so it's pretty essential to diehard fans. I hadn't heard their buddies Hayride previous to this split single, but was pleasently stoked to hear their song "In Bottles", which reminds me a hell of a lot of Daydream Nation era Sonic Youth with more sludgy grit and distortion. Pretty damn cool, actually. Obviously nowhere near as heavy as Harvey Milk, but their jangly, narcoleptic indie-math-noise rock fits comfortably on a platter with the indie-sludge titans. Not sure if this is out of print or not yet, I know that most places are already sold out, and we've got just a couple of copies!

HATERS, THE Hater TV VHS VIDEOCASSETTE $10.98 RRR Video

Excellent cult A/V tumble down the rabbit hole with GX Jupitter-Larsen and The Haters, one of the most brain imploding US noise action groups around. Opening with an upside down performance of COCK E.S.P. style hijinks drowned out by a speak'n'spell machine dialoguing on the subjects of reality and irrationality, this RRRecords-issued videocassette blasts your retina with 45 minutes of Haters-related sounds, performances, and images beamed at you in true nihil-vision. Harsh free electronics, sheet metal orgies, and bizarre performance art all come together in a confounding analogue dream of post-industrial surrealism. PLease note: this is an NTSC VHS videocassette, and will not play on European/PAL systems! Comes in a hardshell case with cover.

HATERS Ordinarily Nowhere CD $8.98 RRRecords

Released as part of the PURE series by RRR, this blistering exercise in experimental noise constructions features the tracks Smack, Fireback, Mangle Whack, and Make A Fire And Be Happy. Beautiful music sculpted out of chaos. Shit is broken, property destroyed, and reconfigured as repetitious hymns of blinding static.

HAWG JAW Send Out The Dogs CD $13.98 Throne
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This CD is a discography of sorts, collecting hard to find comp tracks and several unreleased crushers recorded since 1999, all remixed and remastered. 10 tracks total of vicious grinding punk sludge...easy to see why HAWG JAW are closely aligned with the mighty EYEHATEGOD. As a matter of fact, guitarist Gary was pulling double duty in the JAW and EYEHATEGOD. Included here are the three tracks from Berserker's "South of Hell" comp, one from the Paranoise comp, one from a comp on Deep Six, and five unreleased tunes.  It's a killer of songs that show the band's growth from the "Believe Nothing" LP to their current form. Hawg Jaw's brand of sludge is rooted more in punishing hardcore/crust punk, as the songs are often pretty fast-paced with a lot less dirge than your basic sludge outfit , but there are still loads of southern-tinged riffs and doom crush...it's like some sort of mutated CORROSION OF CONFORMITY, circa "Technocracy", fast and crusty and raw, with massive sludge riffs that threaten to pound you into the mud. Mike Dares' snarling vocals add another unique element to the sound, ranging from a growl to a scream and is delivered in highly offbeat patterns, alternating styles on the stop of a dime.This disc is an essential purchase even if you have the comps that some of these tracks appeared on, since you get five crushing tunes you won’t find anywhere else. There's also a cool video clip and some completely killer artwork, so if you've been missing out on Hawg Jaw this is a great place to start.

HEADACHE Discography CD $12.98 Life Is Abuse

This is an awesomely assembled collection of the recorded works from one of the more bizarre UK bands to thrash their way across the anarchist hardcore underground of 1990's Europe. Headache released a blazing LP on UK label Flat Earth, along with a 7" EP, demo tape, and a handful of compilation tracks, 34 tracks in 72 minutes, all presented here in their ripping, shizoid fury. Headache were sort of a cross between Melt Banana and Crass and some sort of bizarre, alien prog/cabaret/streetpunk hybrid, unleashing frantic Profane Existence style speedpunk blasts with crazed time signatures and a fucked up rock-opera approach, bouncing between those awesome hyperspeed thrash freakouts, angular art-punk, mutant Manowar riff-worship, drunken basement psychedelia, total prog rock forms, and glue-huffing kiddie tunes. We had never heard these guys before landing this exquisitely packaged CD discography from Life Is Abuse, but this has rocketed to the top of our stereo. Totally bizarre and brain twisting and freaking furious when they push the pedal into 600 mph thrashcore tantrum territory. Awesome! Like we mentioned, the packaging is ultra-swank, with the CD packaged inside of a thick 50 page book of artwork, lyrics, comics, and other inked artifacts from their reign. Highly recommended!

HEAD HITS CONCRETE Hope,Fear,And The Terror Of Dreams 7" EP $5.98 Intolerant Messiah

Winnipeg's gnarliest ultrablastcore unit (featuring ex-members of Swallowing Shit) delivers another dose of their intelligent scathing racket! Extreme speed, monstrous riffs, and gasoline drenched vocals.

HEAD HITS CONCRETE Thy Kindgdom Come Undone discography CD $11.98 Crimes Against Humanity

This CD is a colossal collection of everything this Canadian noise grind band ever released...47 tracks of blazing modern grindcore in 60 minutes. This Cd contains the split with Bodies Lay Broken, the Hope Fear & The Terror of Dreams EP, the split 10" with My Minds Mine, the s/t Ep, and a bunch of demo, live and cover tracks. Superfast, brutal stuff with tons of atonal guitar squiggle, absolutely warped melodies, relentlessly blasting drums and insane shrieking vocals, which all comes together like a mix of Drop Dead, Crossed Out, and current "post-grind" outfits like Daughters, A Life Once Lost, and The Locust. At times, it falls apart into manic, insane chaos, and at others the band rips into some ferocious metal riffs. Fucked up stuff, fans of contemporary grindcore will love it. The booklet is jam packed with lyrics and liner notes. A definitive epitaph, and highly recommended to fans of chaotic modern destructo-grind.

HEAVY SEALS Jazz Bust CD $10.98 Troniks

This compact, yet cranium cleaning EP from the new-ish duo of Brace Paine (from THE GOSSIP and DIE MONITR VATSS) and John Wiese (of SISSY SPACEK and BASTARD NOISE) sports a sixteen minute long junk-noise tantrum that comes off as the most punk rock Musique-Concrete outfit EVER. Thoroughly wrecked electronic blurt improv and pots-n-pans violence erupts all over this thing, recorded both live (apparently – the applause after one action tipped us off) and in studio. Varyingly sounds like free jazzbos rioting in the kitchen, heavy duty industrial noise car wrecks, and punchy Atari jams. Eleven tracks, six panel color artwork in jewel case packaging. Rad.

HECKER, TIM Mirages CD $13.98 Alien8
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Hecker creates a sort of blurred shoegazer pop-ambient stripped bare of anything close to being "rock" but not really droney or pure ambient, yet drifting formlessly on night breeze.Following 2003's acclaimed Radio Amor album, Mirages is the latest full length of sumptuous,organic drift layered with slivers of piano,environmental sounds,the soft hum of abandones machinery. Hecker's pallette of processed acoustics is similiar to that of Fennesz, but here he takes a darker route, burying beautiful majestic melodies beneath miles of dreamy static hiss and soft glitchy distortion. This album absolutely breathes nighttime, right down to the exquisite gatefold packaging showing the soft green glow of streetlights at night. Members of fellow Montrealers le Fly Pan Am, Christof Migone, David Bryant, and Oren Ambarchi all appear as well on Mirages, lending their talents to Hecker's delicate constructions. Amazingly gorgeous music, quite possibly the most beautiful album we've heard all year outside of Eluvium's Talk Amongst The Trees.

HELLMOTEL Hang Us Young CD $12.98 Radar Swarm

Radar Swarm has more-or-less become the European answer to Hydra Head, consistently releasing top-quality post-metalcore noise from (mostly) European artists that always manage to knock our socks off, situated in killer packaging and with an overall flair for presenting their art in top-notch mode. Each new release we get our hands on from Radar Swarm continues to own us, so we're always looking forward to what they've got coming out.
So here we are with the debut full lengther from French indie-deathcore bruisers HELLMOTEL. These guys are clearly influenced by CONVERGE, playing a similiar brand of brutal, dissonant metalcore with shredded screaming that's quite reminiscent of Jacob bannon from CONVERGE. But HELLMOTEL injects a mighty ROCK element into this chugfest that turns Hang Us Young into a super-driving, fucking anthemic album loaded with cool elements like EVERY TIME I DIE-style handclaps and rock n' roll raveups, atmospheric parts with clean sung vocals, bursts of fast, oldschool melodic hardcore, ugly, dissonant sludginess, breezy indie-strum and heartbreaking pop hooks with whistling harmonies, and more. Tighly assembled, catchy as hell, but relentlessly brutal from start to finish with enough mosh to level a parking deck. They're like a slightly artsier combo of CONVERGE and EVERY TIME I DIE meets FAITH NO MORE and ISIS. A lush, eccentric rock/metalcore/death n' roll ripper that's been our driving-around soundtrack all week. And check out the hidden last track, a drowned-in-reverb post rock instrumental, like CONVERGE meets GODSPEED!YOU BLACK EMPEROR, eerie and evocative. The packaging features slick metallic printing and sweet art. Really great!

HELL NO Adios Armageddon CD $7.98 Reservoir

The 2nd full length album by this highly underrated post-noise-hardcore band from New York, featuring ex-members of CITIZENS ARREST! Totally psychotic, experimental, heavy, technical and mind-boggling. Contains the songs off the "Superstar Chop 7" as bonus-tracks. Think Jesus Lizard and Shellac filtered through a bloody haze of Touch And Go and 90's ABC NO RIO hardcore noise.

HEMATOVORE s/t CD $11.98 Acerbic Noise Development

Excellent instrumental metallic indie rock from freakin' Auburn, Alabama that's heavy on monster major key hooks and mathy, genre hopping riffmash. Somewhere between the horizontal march and melodic highs of PELICAN, and the galloping, anthemic Indie Maiden heroics of THE CHAMPS, sits HEMATOVORE. One of the reasons why this self titled debut kicks so much ass is the excellent pacing of the album...the band strikes a perfect balance between crushing and catchy, juxtaposing angular metal freakouts,driving thrashy momentum,huge double-and-triple axe harmonies, and extremely slow and heavy metalcore parts with the softer indie rock/post-rock melodies, mellow acoustic breaks, and ridiculously catchy and exhilarating pop hooks and arena rock rapture...dig that crazy Journey/Boston-esque, fully 80's hard rock hook on "Arachnophilia" that's been lodged in our heads all week, right before it morphs into a floor-caving,right-angle chuggernaut. It seems like we've been fawning over alot of instrumental heavy stuff lately for whatever reason, but this is just so good. If you at all into quality singer-free power crunch like Pelican, The Champs, Suzukiton, and Trephine, then this comes with our highest recommendation. Also features crayola-apocalyptic, Aaron Turner (ISIS) designed packaging.

HENTAI LACERATOR Covered In Fun CD-R $6.98 Outfall Channel

40 blazing free-noisecore jams vomiting out in a neon green spew from the collective cracked skulls of Hentai Lacerator! It's the Capital Hemmorhage guys with Robert Inhuman on vocals, and they cram in a ton of microsecond blasts in just 17 minutes with this low-fi collection. Free jazz drumming, incoherent muttering and childlike crying, nasty abstract doom, dayglo spunk and total blurr grind guitar all flying around in a mess of improvised, in-the-moment blastnoise destruction with song titles all ending in "Suck"..."Gargantuan Suck", "Pound Puppy Suck", "Doomsday Suck", you get the picture. Think Gerogerigegege, modern improv, 7 Minutes Of Nausea, Borbetomagus, Hanatarash, and old Earache grindcore as reference points. We love this stuff! Obviously if you're looking for more "structure" in yer grind, this probably isn't for you, but fans of free-noise/grind fusion will love this shit. The Cap Hemmorhage guys released this through their own Outfall Channel imprint in a single run of 100 copies, and it looks awesome, packaged in a bright green spraypainted wallet that has their wicked logo and artwork screenprinted on the front, with the silkscreened disc and a bright yellow xeroxed insert inside.

HENTAI LACERATOR Pound Puppy Suck CASSETTE $2.98 Realicide

Easily one of the most absurd releases we carry. Pound Puppy Suck is a cassingle of the "1st hit single from the Covered In Fun EP", or that's what it says across the top of the enormous foldout postersleeve that this tape comes wrapped up in. It's a goofy companion piece to the Covered... CD-R that we also listed this week from the Ohio noisecore crew Hentai Lacerator, whose supershort, low-fi improvised grind freakouts are equal parts Gerogerigegege, old Fear Of God and 7 Minutes Of Nausea style blurr/grindcore, and Hanatarash's avant wipeout. This is actually pretty cool, if yer a tape junkie like us - the tape is a mere 2 minutes long, with "Pound Puppy Suck", a super short blast of low-fi noisecore improvisation that is also on their CD-R, a couple of other exclusive eruptions, and a remix from DJ Thumper that pretty much kills. And the whole thing is only 2 minutes long, if you didn't catch that the first time. The poster sleeve has more of their awesome graffiti-style grind art, plus an extremely weird written piece from Robert Inhuman that involves a sex act with Slimer from the movie Ghostbusters. Allegedly the green paint that covers the cassette itself is glow-in-the-dark, but we haven't had a chance to put that to the test yet. Definitely looks neat though!

HERESI Psalm II: Infusco Ignis CD $13.98 Hydra Head

Hydra Head continues with their recent assault of underground black metal offerings with a U.S. re-issue of Heresi's awesome Psalm II: Infusco Ignis. This disc was originally released on Total Holocaust, and is now presented in a striking digipack.
Heresi is the one-man Swedish black metal machine operated by former Ondskapt member Skamfer, and delivers an even more brutal, frenzied, ferocious black metal attack with this follow up to 2005's Psalm I. This stuff is way heavier than what you'd expect from a one-man black metal outfit, though. Heresi's black metal is a barbaric, death metal infused fuzzbomb monstrosity, with ripping buzzsaw thrash riffs and mindblowing epic Norse melodies surging up from the pitch-black wall of distortion. The riffs on this are killer, and when Heresi suddenly shifts gears from swarming blastbeat-ridden riffs into a ridiculously rocking and anthemic midtempo thrash breakdown, it's fucking awesome. Bestial, reverb-heavy vocals howl out of the void, drowning in a swirl of dense, hypnotic guitars. Totally killer, depressive, ultra heavy psychedelic black/thrash, weird and haunting and amazingly catchy, with a similiar vibe as Deathspell Omega, Funeral Mist, and Onskapt, and packaged in an amazing looking digipack adorned in a horrific painting from Wrest of Leviathan. Awesome.

HER NAME IS DEATH Loathsome Christ CD $6.98 Munchausen Sound

This Alabama group slogs through a single 20-minute low-fi, heavy sludgebuzz assault, droning basement doom covered in grimy feedback and moving at seriously slothlike pace. For fans of ampbuzz headfuck a la BORIS and CORRUPTED. Features Eric Crowe (SOCIAL INFESTATION,MOLEHILL,MARAX,FULCI). Packaged in a DVD style plastic case.

HERPES O DELUXE Havarie CD $14.98 Everest

Awesome drone / ambient / noise from this Swiss electronics/turntablist quartet, featuring lots of buzzing,black-hole cinematic synth drones a la John Carpenter mixed with eerie electronic sinewaves, spacey theremin-like drones, and stretched-apart vocal loops that focus on single vowels and indeterminable phrases. There are also a few sparse prepared / film samples that appear, but mostly this is all about drifting, abstract drone and glitchy noise. The opening and closing tracks are epic, nearly half an hour in length each, with dense, Thomas Koner - esque drones and warbling waves of shoegazer distortion gradually building into rhythmic pulses and beats with beautiful melodies and piercing feedback. Great stuff that came highly recommended by J.R. over at Public Guilt, this is like Christian Marclay, Zoviet France, Lustmord, and Laurie Anderson all wrapped up into one. Drone fans should check this out, as well as those of you that are into the Still "Remains" solo album (which we also just got in stock). Swiss import.

HEWHOCORRUPTS The Smell Of Money CD $9.98 Eugenics

Blazing new CD of smart, tough grindcore from HE WHO CORRUPTS, the high-stakes stock brokers from Chicago who are also some of our favorite blast technicians around right now. The Smell Of Money invests in rocking, furious blastwerk like some mutoid amalgam of SEPTIC DEATH, TODAY IS THE DAY, and INFEST , and is powered by the singers barking proclamations, a rock n’ roll grindcore evangelist. HWC’s ironic and cynical assessment of upward mobility, the power of money, and corporate existence is fucking right on, and the whole assault is emboldened with powerful production. The sleek digipack is adorned with ominous robots courtesy of Jeremy Wabiszczewicz (who has done smokin’ artwork recently for DAUGHTERS and Hydra Head Records, and there’s even a scratch n’ sniff panel that actually SMELLS like money. The disc features enhanced content including the amazing video for HWC’s Master Of Profits!

HEX SCREW s/t 3" CD-R $4.98 MT6

Here's a nasty 11:33 of freeform deconstruction that alternates between brutal, hysterical feedback riots, armies of skipping CDs sending mangled missives into the heavens, post-nuke flamenco guitar, and ear-flattening gobs of charred grindnoise. One of the most vicious things I've heard from MT6 Records, and one of my favorite as well, an utterly weird and abstract take on progpunkpop/harsh noise/noisecore blitz made by 17 year old Sam Garrett of Baltimore, Maryland. This earfuck suggests Scutopus meeting Flying Luttenbachers and Anal Cunt in a hailstorm of burnt circuitry at some cannibal dance club. Not for timid listeners. This little 3" gem comes hand-colored and stuck inside of a xerox sleeve.

HEY COLOSSUS II CD $11.98 Shifty

Consider me pleasantly stomped in the face by HEY COLOSSUS ' crushingly heavy, mutant indie rock monster! Imagine FUGAZI meets MELVINS with the propulsive drone of CAN's krautrock pulse. Huge single-chord chugging wraps itself around a circular beat, a massively distorted 3-axe attack swings gigantic downtuned riffs around pulsating krautrock rhythms...the band has been getting compared to "Black Sabbath meets Neu! ", and while that doesn't exactly nail down how friggin' heavy this is, it gives you an idea of the propulsive crush that these 6 songs administer. Yes, there is clearly a love of krautrock at play here, with nods to both CAN and NEU! in their cyclical charge, but there's more as well....parts of this that sound like early DINOSAUR JR. and FUGAZI, that wiry feedback driven indie-guitar rock sound, but jammed into the motorik avalanche of their hypnotic heaviosity....great waves of feedback jam and crunchy guitar noise as amp worshipping as BORIS or MELVINS ' grit explorations...and while II is as potently heavy as the Hydra Head mafia in it's clearly post-rock informed delivery, this is not the NEUROSIS worship/interpretation that fueled the opening salvos from those outfits. No, the infectious dirge of HEY COLOSSUS seems more closely rooted in the sounds of SST / Dischord / Merge circa-1989, but pumped full of steroids and armed with MUCH BIGGER AMPS. We at Crucial Blast love our ultra-heavy indie rock, and HEY COLOSSUS' II is an awesome addition to the field. Highly recommended !! And did I mention that they have three guitarists?

HEY COLOSSUS Project: Death CD $11.98 Underhill

The long-awaited new album from Hey Colossus! We LOVED their last album II on Spanish label Underhill Records, which effortlessly bound huge grooving droneriffs and crushing rivers of molten metallic sludge to burly shouted vocals, spacey Hawkwind style electronic FX shooting through the air, and a propulsive, albeit mega pummeling, percussive drive achieved by years of studied listening of classic Krautrock albums. Truly mighty stuff! Now they're back with Project: Death, produced by Tim Cedar from tourmates and likeminded sludge rockers Part Chimp, with a new batch of tunes that are even heavier and catchier than before. Seems like the presence of Part Chimp's Tim mighta rubbed off on the HC guys, as there's an added melodicism here underneath all of the concrete-crushing riffage that I don't remember being so prominent on past releases. Plus, they've gone and added a new member whose sole responsibility is playing a Korg Kaospad, which contributes the swarms of electronic noises that float through the album's 8 tracks. Songs like "Do They Ever Return?" and "Frozed" build slowly over down-tuned slow motion riffage and the chirping of malfunctioning circuitboards, while "I Am The Chiswick Strangler" is a fast paced eruption of molten metallic garage rock. Then comes "45 Pounds", which almost sounds like Torche slamming headfirst into a Fistula jam while Man Is The Bastard's oscillators whir in the background. The rest of the album continues to move through majestic, spacey indie sludge, hypnotic repeato-riffs, and bass-heavy rhythmic workouts, a massive, rumbling wave of sludge rock that stitches chunks of Melvins riffage, Hawkwind's psychedelia, the melodic slomo splatter of Harvey Milk, the percussive krautrock of Can, and the lumbering machine groove of Godflesh together into a monolithic battering ram. Highly recommended, as are all of Hey Colossus' releases! PLEASE NOTE - the copies we received from the label were received with a slight ring crease in the booklets from being shipped to us with the discs in the booklets..other than that mild ring-crease, the booklets are in otherwise perfect shape.

MP3 SAMPLE: "45 Pounds" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Frozed" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "On the Pleasure of Hating" (excerpt)

HEY COLOSSUS / DOT[.] split LP $13.98 Shifty

Two longform dronesludge transmissions direct from London and Tokyo, inscribed on this plate of black vinyl and bound in a jacket decorated in eerie Rorscach-art with a two-color insert sheet, in a limited edition of 411 copies. Both of these bands are big faves around here, each one possessing a unique, fucked-up take on slow motion heaviness. It's been awhile since I last heard anything new from Dot(.), a Japanese trio who specialize in extreme slow motion, dirgey sludge and who feature members of the cult deathsludge band Coffins, but it's always good news when they re-emerge from their blacklit pit to grace us with their lysergic lava doom. For this split LP, Dot(.) brings us the 20 minute epic 'Black Acid', a pulverizing, ridiculously heavy slab of psychedelic deathdoom surrounded by writhing tendrils of black feedback, trippy deathbeast roars, and glacial lumbering riffage. The guitars are beyond detuned, strings flopping off the fretboard and distorted into a thickened crumbling hypnotic sludge, huge and menacing. The bassist and singer, Kohki, fucks up his ultra-deep, monstrous death vocals with tons of trippy, dub-style reverb and delay, shooting the bestial roars off into the blackness. Awesome, psychedelic tarpit death, like Corrupted and Graves At Sea but even more dosed. On the other side are the UK triple-guitar ensemble Hey Colossus, who I've been a fan of since hearing their killer last album on Shifty. Their song 'Kittens' starts up with a couple of minutes of eerie, beautiful space rock ambience before the band kicks in with a slowly building wave of clean powerchords and amplifiers rumbling in the background, sort of like a cross between Boris and newer Earth mixed with Slint, a single massive riff played over and over while trippy electronic effects swoop overhead, the song building in intensity until it melts down into a swirling vat of oscillating, mind-melting FX splattered feedback and circuitry, and then rises again as a fucking stomping stoner sludge hypno assault, huge repetitive riffing and wind tunnel singing. Awesome, massive, krautrock-inspired sludgemetal.

HIDDEN Aleisstar Morphalite CD $11.98 Red Stream

New full length from this bizarre death/thrash/astral doom hybrid immersed in utterly weird, Lovecraftian scientific concepts. The music on this album is a pretty demented mixture of primitive, reptilian death metal and stumbling cybernetic black metal, with speedy thrash metal morphing into pretty, melancholy funeral dirge splattered in lots of random electronic effects and eerie piano, and grotesque stop/start deathmetal assaults that suddenly, confusingly break into unexpected fields of synthesizer drones and baroque keyboard creep. The songs all have these weird hiccups in their structures, with electronic sounds and percussion popping up all over the place, and then there are the gross gutteral vocals reciting ridiculously complex lyrics concerning occult scientific phenomenon, and song titles like "Deathstar Oblivion" and "Interplanetary Space Physics And Climatology". But as fucked up as the music on Aleisstar Morphalite is, these songs are amazingly catchy, with loads of killer hooks and riffs, crazy major key parts that border on "poppy", but delivered via a buzzsaw alien thrash onslaught with convoluted electronics and monstrous death roars! Fans of damaged, cryptic outsider metal weirdness like Benighted Leams and Striborg should check it out.

HIDDEN Spectral Magnitude CD $11.98 Red Stream

Spectral Magnitude is the first full length from astral thrashers Hidden. We only recently found out about this obscure band on the Red Stream label who shroud themselves in total anonimity, going so far as to not include any personal information in their CD booklets or packaging. Hell, we've had a hard time finding anything out about Hidden online, other than that they might be from Finland. This mystique is appropriate for the utterly fucked cosmic death metal these guys deal in, a ferocious, off-kilter, sorta stumbling death thrash attack with splattery blastbeats, confusing song structures that have the band moving in 90 degree angles, ultra lumbering death-doom dirge with strangely melodic, major key melodies that appear out of nowhere, and killer gutteral vocals that are sometimes processed into an alien shriek, or chopped up and pushed into the front of the mix a la Faxed Head. In addition, Hidden's entire agenda and all of their imagery is wrapped up in a kind of Lovecraftian astrophysics that has the singer belching out lines like "Ice crust of Yek / Water & light specs / fast exosicence" or Changes in the sun made warming stronger / A solar interaction drifting on time and fate / geochemical molecule primates". Hell yeah. It's like a death metal version of Voivod's bizarre sci-fi robo thrash! Not that Hidden sound like Voivod, per se...they just share that same fucked science theory combined with primal speed/thrash metal and twisted molten songform. Actually, musically Hidden remind us of early Celtic Frost, if they had suddeny turned into a retro-space-prog outfit. And hang on for the "hidden" track at the end, an awesome deep-space instrumental psych dirge, equal parts whooshing Zombi/Goblin soundtrack prog, trudging death metal riff, and droning Floydian synths !!! Packaging has killer space art from JP Fournier. Def recommended for fans of weird/outsider/bent death-thrash.

HIDDEN HAND, THE The Resurrection Of Whiskey Foote 2xCD $14.98 Southern Lord

The latest album from doom-rock heavyweights The Hidden Hand, the current power trio headed by doom legend Scott "Wino" Weinrich (The Obsessed, Saint Vitus, Probot, Place Of Skulls). With each new release, The Hidden Hand has become more and more nuanced and progressive, and with the band's third album The Resurrection Of Whiskey Foote, they've produced a heavy, heady quais-concept album with the same lineup that appeared on the out-of-print Devoid Of Color EP from last year, and which continues in the Hand's style of marrying colossal doom rock riffage to weighty subject matter. The album's loose narrative revolves around a mythical individual from Revolutionary War-era colonial America that becomes a sort of messianic figure, and is set against the band's backdrop of righteous jams like the ripping hard rock of "Lightning Hill" and it's awesome high energy harmonica lead, and the pounding Grand Funk/Sabbath massiveness of"Majestic Presence" which shoots one of Resurrection's most searing solos right thru yer skull before bathing you in beautiful synth bliss and an awesome comsic psych coda. And check out bassist Bruce Falkinburgh channeling some killer Blackie Lawless style snarl on the raging "Black Dog"! Obsessed-style power dirges, Southern rock, hard-chargin' 80's metal vibes, and proggy doom riffs all come together into the band's most progressive, grandiose album to date, dark and heavy, massive and thought-provoking. Awesome! This version of the album is the limited edition edition that also includes the out-of-print Devoid Of color EP, and comes packaged in a hand-numbered 5" mini-gatefold/double pocket, thick-cardboard jacket.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Lightning Hill" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Someday Soon" (excerpt)

HIDDEN HAND, THE / WOOLY MAMMOTH Night Letters 2xCD $11.98 Meteor City

We used to have this on 12" vinyl years ago, which is now long sold-out and out of print, but we just picked up some copies of this double disc for any fans of The Hidden Hand or Wooly Mammoth fans that missed out on this EP previously. The EP itself is only one disc, more on the other disc in a minute...the Night Wounds EP features two great tracks from The Hidden Hand, which of course most doom/stoner/metal fans know by now is the present band of doom legend Wino (The Obsessed / Saint Vitus). This release was their follow-up to the debut album on Meteor City (which we also have in stock), two new tracks of heavy, proggy doom-rock with dual vocals from Wino and Bruce Falkinburgh and heady lyrics, and some massive throbbing riffage. "Five Points" is a total rocker, with winding, complex riffage and howling electronic textures and shot through with lyrical references that would reappear on their Mother Teacher Destroyer album. "Welcome To Sunshine" is a winding instrumental jam that is a staple of the band's live set, and which borders on math rock with it's complex guitar lines and intricate polyrhytmic drumming. Pretty killer! Then there's the Wooly Mammoth tracks, who also hail from the DC/Baltimore area; their two tracks "The Prophet" and "Mastercut + Charisma" are almost as heavy as the Hidden Hand's, a lurching brand of psychedelic doom rock that falls somewhere in between Goatsnake's soulful sludginess and classic 70's fuzz rock. Pretty badass, not too many people know about these guys, but if yer a fan of heavy, hooky stoner rock and sludgy riffage you should check 'em out. The Night Letters EP is only about 18 minutes long, so we've tried to keep the price as low as we can for this. But then there's also the second disc that comes with this package, a Meteor City label compilation which will be of interest to stoner rock/doom metal fans for the inclusion of rare demo tracks from The Atomic Bitchwax and YOB, as well as rough mixes and previously released jams from Weedeater, The Obsessed, Meatjack, Orquestra del Desierto, Ribeye Brothers, Black Nasa, and Spiritu.

MP3 SAMPLE: THE HIDDEN HAND "Five Points" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: WOOLY MAMMOTH "The Prophet" (excerpt)

HITCH Prince Of The Saw Mill 7" EP $5.98 Boredom Noise

Whiskey slinging biker metal from Arcata CA. Heavy as hell lumberjack rock, fans of SCISSORFIGHT and ANTISEEN would particularly dig these jacked up dirtmetal anthems. Louder than a Sturgis brawl.

HIVE MIND Death Tone CD $14.98 Hanson

This isn't a new disc, as Death Tone was released by Hanson back in late 2005, but if yer like me and only really got into the Michigan synth-scuzz jugernaut Hive Mind recently, then this is an essential entry into the Hive's monstrous, grinding crunchscapes. Hive Mind is the primary project of Greh Holger, who is also the guy behind the generally amazing Chrondritic Sound label, itself a source of serious heavy electronics. Through HM, Holger has been releasing tons of tapes and CD-Rs that document his experiments in dark, post-industrial heaviness, but all of these small-press releases have gone out of print pretty much immediately. Death Tone is one of HM's more available releases, comparitively speaking, issued by Hanson in an edition of 1000. And it's an epic, 43-minute monstrosity of slow-burning synthesizer screech and low-end, almost subsonic subterranean rumble produced by what sound like damaged analog synths and amplifiers in the midst of total meltdown, at times similiar to fellow Michigan circuit destroyers Wolf Eyes, but just as often gliding on jet-black glaciers of noisy, menacing drone and nightmarish ambience.The disc starts off with a quiet, minimal oscillator sinewave that slowly builds over the course of the first 10 minutes into a cloud of buzzing electrical tones and hum, like hearing the flickering of malfunctioning streetlights in the middle of the night. Eventually everything blossoms into a massive distorted machine rumble, grinding scuzz and deep bass-frequency throbs booming out of the void, a dreadful soundfield of rotting vegetation and peeling paint amplified to deafening levels. This album delivers a hypnotic, narcotic experience when absorbed in a single sitting (as it should be), a captivating dose of heavy, apocalyptic noise/drone from the pit that crawls deep in under your skin. Recommended.

MP3 SAMPLE: "Death Tone" (excerpt)

HIVE MIND Sand Beasts CD $9.98 Troniks

An awesome 38 minute release of nocturnal Earth purr and power line vibrations from Greh (also of Gate To Gate / Chondritic Sound) and Shawn (Sirkuit Electronics). Our buddy David from Luasa Raelon turned us onto "Sand Beasts" several months ago, and we've been hooked on HIVE MIND's wind-swept analogue synth death-drone ever since (see our review of the Hive Mind/Luasa Raelon Night Maintenance CD elsewhere in the webstore). Powered by accumulating waves of analog synth buzz, HIVE MIND creates deep, desolate, and scorched dronescapes, like a John Carpenter / Throbbing Gristle collaboration for night terrors, build into speaker shredding earth-core rumblings that really does evoke the movement of massive creatures beneath the dunes, accentuated with churning, subdued electronic feedback spikes and blackened circuit shred. Sand Beasts ends up turning into a seriously heavy exercise in powerdrone.

HIVE MIND / LUASA RAELON Night Maintenance CD $11.98 Snip Snip

As soon as we set eyes on the tasty red/silver cardstock cover and the names Luasa Raelon and Hive Mind on the spine, we knew it was going to be temple-stroking powerdrone time, low-frequency quake-beat time, as these guys are both at the head of the class when it comes to barbed-wire rumble-ambient. Both of their recent Troniks releases tyrannized the C-Blast boombox for weeks, so finding them paired together so soon really scratches the itch for more nocturnal hell-hum. Analogue synth mutator master HIVE MIND starts the disc with a single track, "The Marble Orchard", a subtle grinding buzz-pulse so grimy low-end you could freak to it, if you had enough cough syrup in you. But it gets out of Wolf Eyes type territory after about 6 minutes when the groove morphs into a post-nuke summer night with cyborg cicada chirps and spontaneous eruptions of radioactive shimmer, gradually sliding into a sublime nighttime urban drone. Righteous vibrations , clocking in at the epic 20 minute mark. LUASA RAELON follows with 4 tracks, with titles like "Devouring The Light" and "Twilight Of The Gods". Rock! C-Blast buddy David Reed ( a.k.a Luasa Raelon ), alongside Eric Crowe of Marax, is currently owning the ultra-stygian, Cthulhian post-industrial dirgescape...this stuff is for those of us who think Lustmord is too sunny. Reed dives in and out of cavernous depths with his oscillator set to "bad dreams", horrific blackened ambient electronics, like John Carpenter's grinding synths circa The Thing on an eternal loop. Freaking awesome. But the highlight of this disc is the final track, the title track, a collaborative exercise that starts off with the sound of midnight electrical buzz and the keening of abandoned warehouse districts...building into a swooping oscillator/synth hook straight outta Dr. Who's worst nightmares. Fucking creepy stuff. The package on this is appropriately eerie, gnarled high-contrast tree roots on a stark blood red print.

HJARNIDAUDI Pain:Noise:March CD $11.98 Paradigms
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

This debut release from Norway's HJARNIDAUDI rises from the remains of doom-ambient shamans HLIDOLF, who released an increcible CD of dark, subterranean drone sludge, equal parts SUNN O))) and LUSTMORD, Klaus Schulze and EARTH, a swirling epic mass of slomo drift. HJARNIDAUDI picks up where HLIDOLF left off, but instead of tunneling further into the depths, HJARNIDAUDI seems to rise skyward, a white blast of fuzzy, slowly shifting melody and weirdly crystalline guitars, soaring on sparse, glacial beats. Forty two minutes of incandescent, sparkling thunder-drone and warm, syrupy astral space doom. Majestic like JESU, but way slower...and similiar to ESOTERIC's apocalyptic ambience, as filtered through Klaus Schulzes' electronic epics and miles of noisy shoegazer fluff. Limited edition of 750 copies, and comes in a color card sleeve sealed in a hand-stamped envelope and outer wallet.

HOG CALLER Predestined For Hell CD $11.98 Last House On The Right

Psychedelic backwoods grindcore massacre! We've procured an assload of great new outsider-grind CDs from the bizarre, deep underground label Last House On The Right recently, which has been fucking us up righteously with all sorts of weird, low-fi post-CARCASS blast noise. And this brand new full length from Pennsylvanian duo HOG CALLER is at the top of the heap in terms of sheer skull blasting weirdness! Super noisy and raw but produced with enough low end to keep things nice and crushing, HOG CALLER's LSD-chugging goregrind uses an array of hyperspeed drum machine blasts a la AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED that are way beyond anything a human drummer could pull off. This stuff is far more damaged and drug-addled than most of their Roland programming peers, though...these guys slice through awesome grindcore explosions and formless noisecore (a la ANAL CUNT) with acid fried guitar solos and sudden downshifts into raw stoner sludginess that sorta remind me of the dayglo scum metal of early, pre-MTV WHITE ZOMBIE jams. Those killer sludge rock riffs are all over this album, but they never stick around for too long, eventually consumed in a storm of supersonic blastbeat swarms and industrialized sludge filth. And HC's surrealist splatter poetry is delivered by a dual vocal blast that mixes together these weird distorted cyborg vocals with INSANE shrieks that sound like - I kid you not - bona fide panicked pig squeals. There's even a moment of deranged awesomeness where the band syncs up the rapid fire speak-chant of a livestock auctioneer with their grinding blastbeats. It's little surprise to find out that these guys are from the town where the Three Mile Island meltdown occured, this stuff is so terminally mutant. Toss in all sorts of fucked up noise, straight up hard rock bridges, and weird samples, and the haunting psych-drone loop of closing track "Revelry For The Dead", and you get one of the most insane, lysergic grind albums of 2006! Nasty freaking package design, too.

HOG CALLER / HEADCRASH Proper Parasite Mannerisms / Mindfuck Paranoia split CD $9.98 Last House On The Right

Where in the hell does Bill at Last House dig these bands up? I mean, seriously, when I listen to stuff like the new S.M.E.S. album or this Hog Caller / Headcrash split, I'm in total grinding psychotropic ecstacy. It's like Bill has perfected his weirdo grind radar to zero in on the most drug-damaged, psychedelic blast spew on the planet. Hog Caller were already familiar to me from their LSD-splattered album Predestined For Hell, which I thought was fucking fantastic, and even though this split CD came out a while before their album did, these seven jams are just as freaked out. Just look at the photo of these dudes in the booklet: one of them dressed in Amish garb, the other in overalls, both wearing gasmasks with the cooling towers of Three Mile Island visible behind them in the distance. One of these guys is actually Steve O'Donnell, who played guitar for experimental grind legends Exit-13 and released some brilliant crushing psych-industrial under the name PICA on Relapse/Release back in the 1990's. Hog Caller continues in that experimental vein, combining insanely fast programmed blastbeats and crusty, noisy riffs downshifting into slow lumbering sludgecore, processed and robotic sounding distorted vocals, and weird samples and effects. When the songs 'Fall from Bridge High Up' and 'The Cause' kick in, they become something like Butthole Surfers gone sludgy splatter grind and fronted by demonic alien insect beings, an intensely weird and psychedelic mix that shoots a kind of lysergic rock groove in among the synthetic blasting and cackling vocals. Wow!
Is the Dutch duo Headcrash fucked up enough to match Hog Caller's contribution? Most DEFINITELY. Beginning with a brief drift through a swirling psychedelic dronescape, Headcrash suddenly rip into total digital grind/noise mayhem, constructed solely from drum-computers, guitars, and vocals. And those vocals...the singer Luc runs his voice through some weird effects that switches between an impossibly low carnivorous roar and a horrific insectoid scream that sounds completely nuts. The grind is a synthesized hyperspeed assault, kinda like Wadge or Tumour, with weird effects and noises thrown in over the crustified, downtuned riffs. There's a couple parts where they slip into a sickeningly heavy groove that you'd never guess came from two dudes and a drum machine, and the last track 'Locked & Mindfucked' is all of five seconds of total blastnoise.

HOG MOUNTIN / MOSE split CD $12.98 Psychedoomelic

Another new split album of pissed-off, pulverizing sludgecore fresh on our racks is this new trans-continental slab from Hog Mountin and Mose. Hog Mountin drop three tracks of greasy, demonic boogie-sludge that sounds like it's being played by a bunch of whiskey chugging mountain barbarians from the backwoods of Alabama, clad in animal skins and bone necklaces, recording their sprawling, 10+ minute jams of psychedelic sludgecrust in an abandoned chicken shack. Which might very well be the case. This is slow, pounding sludgecore in the vein of Eyehategod, Weedeater, and Buzzoven, but with an even heavier propensity to take a riff and ride it out into infinity. Great song titles too: "Harvest Temple", "13 Horns", and "Dirt Worshiper" all drip with a sinister rural scumfuck vibe. Great shit. Then comes Mose, the Belgian sludge weirdos whose self-titled single flew outta here when we got them in about a year ago. Featuring members of Neuthrone and former Southern Lord outfit Thee Plague Of Gentlemen as well as a current member of Kiss The Anus Of The Black Cat, Mose deliver three songs which are even more raw and low-fi than the Hog Mountin tracks; "Fistful Of Broken Nails" and "How To Kill A Pig" move from torturous, heavy as hell mud-crawling sludge a la Eyehategod/Grief to weird melodic, mathy breaks and oddly catchy choruses, fronted by a drooling, drawled blackened rasp that makes Mose sound pretty diseased. The final track "Atlas Shrugging" is even slower and more strung out, a glacial death-blues processional marching over heavy blackened amplifier wreckage for about nine minutes, and then suddenly breaks down into a very weird math rock coda. I still can't put my finger on exactly what the fuck these guys are doing, but it sounds great. Really heavy and crushing yet uniquely weird.

HOLLOWING / MARSPITER Habashira CD $9.98 The Rectrix

An excellent hour-long split/collaborative work between HOLLOWING (Matt Gibney of NY grindpop outfit SOIHADTOSHOOTHIM) and MARSPITER (M.Todd). The four Hollowing tracks are jarring, truly frightening exercises in explosive death-noise (you might want to stay close to the volume knob on your stereo!) colliding with violent, minimal peals of neoclassical power ambience, bookended by wheezing drones and loops, zomboid death industrial marches, rhythmic tribal percussion, treated/looped environmental sounds (including what sounds like a hellish choir of satanic frogs) and musique concrete, totally sinister flamenco-esque guitar, diseased power electronics outbursts, burbling robo-chatter...by far the best stuff Matt has done to date with Hollowing. Totally unclassifiable. Marspiter works in a more subdued manner, combing dark drone ambient with dreamlike neoclassical movements. Sort of like Lustmord and Nosferatu-era Popul Vuh hooking up with Karjalan Sissit and Megaptera , which does well to segue between the brutality and dread of the Hollowing tracks. Sweet stuff. This isn’t so much a split CD, rather Habashira is the product of two complimentary artists working together to create a seamless complete thought addressing the horror of our diseased civilization.

HOMOSTUPIDS The Intern CD $10.98 Parts Unknown

I've got an old copy of the Jerrys Kids Is This My World LP that I picked up at a garage sale for 50 cents like, 15 years ago; it was sitting at the bottom of a cardboard boz filled with used spraypaint cans and Barbie doll heads. The fucking record wasn't even in a sleeve, just buried there, scratched to shit and warped, the grooves caked with bongwater crud and carport grime, the freakin' center label bubbling up off the vinyl. Nobody would've expected this piece of shit to actually play on a turntable, it was so fucked up, but I dropped my two quarters and took this destroyed relic home; it took a while to get the record spinnin' since it was so mauled that I had to tape a brick to the needle to keep it from launching right off the vinyl, but once I got it goin', I was getting baked to the warbliest, wobbliest, most distorted Jerrys Kids performance imaginable, the songs shifting in speed and blaring through a wall of crunchy hiss as the needle tried to plow through the years of shit and abuse that poor LP had weathered. Obviously not how that album was supposed to sound, but I thought it sounded fuckin' killer, and no doubt had a detrimental effect on the subsequent evolution of my musical diet. I mention this as we just got the new EP from Cleveland's Homostupids in stock here at C-Blast, a band who actually sound that fucked up naturally. The Intern is the blistering new EP from this ferocious gang of thrashers fronted by Steve Peffer, who has also been blowing his lungs out for 9 Shocks Terror for the past decade. On their rad Brutal Birthday 7" from not too long ago, Homostupids channeled a similiar sort of thrashy punk rock as 9 Shocks but fucked it all up with weird circuit-bent electronic sounds, production fuckery, and zonked beats. It reminded me of a mix of 9 Shocks-style hardcore atavism, Chrome, and Brainbombs, and I freakin' loved it. Now we've got this slightly-longer EP with 14 songs in 17 minutes, and it's full-bore, noisy-as-hell low-fi garage hardcore punk on acid, sorta reminding me of that old school Jerrys Kids style hardcore meets the Dwarves, as heard through a permanent sheen of razor distortion and inept noise. Almost all of the songs are a minute and a half long, alternating between fast thrashy rippers and ridiculously anthemic mid-tempo rockers, and there are hooks galore, fucked up with weird vocal effects zooming around, songs suddenly stopping in a pile of mangle like someone just jammed a thumb into the tape heads, feedback and malfunctioning instrument cables squealing all over the place. It's glorious, awesome, blown out hardcore stumble in the spirit of the latest wave of scumpunk/pigfuck outfits (Lambsbread, Violent Students, Pissed Jeans, Clockcleaner, New Flesh) but way catchier!

HOMOSTUPIDS The Intern LP $11.98 Parts Unknown

Now available on vinyl!
I've got an old copy of the Jerrys Kids Is This My World LP that I picked up at a garage sale for 50 cents like, 15 years ago; it was sitting at the bottom of a cardboard boz filled with used spraypaint cans and Barbie doll heads. The f*cking record wasn't even in a sleeve, just buried there, scratched to sh*t and warped, the grooves caked with bongwater crud and carport grime, the freakin' center label bubbling up off the vinyl. Nobody would've expected this piece of sh*t to actually play on a turntable, it was so f*cked up, but I dropped my two quarters and took this destroyed relic home; it took a while to get the record spinnin' since it was so mauled that I had to tape a brick to the needle to keep it from launching right off the vinyl, but once I got it goin', I was getting baked to the warbliest, wobbliest, most distorted Jerrys Kids performance imaginable, the songs shifting in speed and blaring through a wall of crunchy hiss as the needle tried to plow through the years of sh*t and abuse that poor LP had weathered. Obviously not how that album was supposed to sound, but I thought it sounded f*ckin' killer, and no doubt had a detrimental effect on the subsequent evolution of my musical diet. I mention this as we just got the new EP from Cleveland's Homostupids in stock here at C-Blast, a band who actually sound that f*cked up naturally. The Intern is the blistering new EP from this ferocious gang of thrashers fronted by Steve Peffer, who has also been blowing his lungs out for 9 Shocks Terror for the past decade. On their rad Brutal Birthday 7" from not too long ago, Homostupids channeled a similiar sort of thrashy punk rock as 9 Shocks but f*cked it all up with weird circuit-bent electronic sounds, production f*ckery, and zonked beats. It reminded me of a mix of 9 Shocks-style hardcore atavism, Chrome, and Brainbombs, and I freakin' loved it. Now we've got this slightly-longer EP with 14 songs in 17 minutes, and it's full-bore, noisy-as-hell low-fi garage hardcore punk on acid, sorta reminding me of that old school Jerrys Kids style hardcore meets the Dwarves, as heard through a permanent sheen of razor distortion and inept noise. Almost all of the songs are a minute and a half long, alternating between fast thrashy rippers and ridiculously anthemic mid-tempo rockers, and there are hooks galore, f*cked up with weird vocal effects zooming around, songs suddenly stopping in a pile of mangle like someone just jammed a thumb into the tape heads, feedback and malfunctioning instrument cables squealing all over the place. It's glorious, awesome, blown out hardcore stumble in the spirit of the latest wave of scumpunk/pigf*ck outfits (Lambsbread, Violent Students, Pissed Jeans, Clockcleaner, New Flesh) but way catchier! Highly recommended!

HORTUS Songs For Plenus CD-R $4.98 CNP Records

More freak thrash from CNP! HORTUS are a drum and bass duo that unleash a bizarre whirlwind of lysergic blastpunk, like NOMEANSNO and MAN IS THE BASTARD and SPAZZ rolled into one, plowing through quick, superfast, spastic bursts of bass-heavy powerviolence, but broken up by really weird random sounds and noises and soulful rock breakdowns. There are notions that these weirdos might have something to do with the band GNOB, a short lived grindcore unit from Virginia that were in a similiar state of fucked-up'd-ness. Hallucinatory, battle-axe weilding drug blast that fits well next to SUPPRESSION. Hand scrawled disc comes packaged in a simple construction paper sleeve. Punk.

HOT GIRLS COOL GUYS / ABE VIGODA split cassingle w/pin $5.98 Not Not Fun
THIS IS CURRENTLY OUT OF PRINT OR OTHERWISE UNAVAILABLE AT THIS TIME. PLEASE DO NOT ORDER.

A brief but tasty blast of abrasive noisepunk -as- art-object with this crafty cassingle featuring Hot Girls Cool Guys and Abe Vigoda. Sacto's Hot Girls Cool Guys unleash some maniac art-punk damage via Gravity Records spazzout on the A-side with "Ponytale", and the flip has weirdo punks Abe Vigoda spinning around a carnivalesque skronk number before exiting via some stuttering thrash. Sweet. The tape is painted gold on one side, green on the other, and comes inside of a small silkscreened canvas tote bag covered in intangible artwork from Michael Vidal of Abe Vigoda and George Myers of Grey Skull, with a 1" button attached.

HOTGUITARS with Santtu Puuka Hierarkia CD $11.98 Karkia Mistika

HOTGUITARS are Teemu Korpipaa and Jyrki Laiho, who are both members of Finnish hypno-rockers CIRCLE (Jyrki currently, Teemu formerly), as well as doing time in STALWART, EKTROVERDE, and LEE MILLER...But HOTGUITARS is a far cry from CIRCLE and family. This is space-blasting abstract guitar noise, with lots of glitchy pulses and sub-technoid rhythms created from looped guitars,endless washes of textured noise,spiralling melodies,crunchy string bash,squealing bouts of freeform feedback blurt and pickup/fretboard mangle...but swirling into surprisingly pretty miasmas most of the time. HOTGUITARS explore similiar axe-terrain as K.K. NULL and SOLMANIA, so fans of those Japanese guitar/effects shamans will find much to like. But this album is also a collaboration with Finnish poet Santuu Puuka, whose stern,ominous sermons add an utterly surreal haze to HOTGUITARS axe abuse. Killer abstract avant-guitar shrapnel.

HOTOTOGISU + BURNING STAR CORE Volume One CD $13.98 Drone Disco

Couldn't be more stoked! Two of the heaviest free-drone units on the planet teaming up for a nearly hour-long jam of saurian proportions? Hell yes. This awesome 5-part monument of live, improvised drone rock power was captured in November of 2005 while Hototogisu was on tour through Kentucky; the Burning Star Core lineup in action here has BSC's Spencer Yeh accompanied by Trevor Tremaine and Robert Beatty of Hair Police, teaming up with Hototogisu's Matthew Bower (Skullflower/Total/Sunroof) and Marcia Bassett (Double Leopards/Zaimph). What you get is an extended zone-out roar of horizontally drifting feedback doom, black blossoms of amplifier noise and amplified violin skree swirled together into intense psychedelic swarm. Skyward vocals and blurry distortion fuse together into an ecstatic stream. Trevor Tremaine's drumming is what adds the serious levels of h e a v y present here, his sludgy rhythms building into propulsive krautrock inspired grooves just as often as he devolves into splattery, freeform percussion. This collab is definitely the sum of its parts, and I can't imagine that fans of any of the involved artists other projects wouldn't find this as righteous as we do. Think Skullflower, Amon Düül, formless noise rock, ambient sludge. Fucking awesome. Released in a limited edition and presented in a rad black polycase with full-sleeve wraparound artwork of a high contrast B&W snapshot of the squad hanging out, b&w insert, and a 1" button. Highly recommended!

HOTOTOGISU / PRURIENT Snail On A Razor CD $14.98 Hospital Productions

Snail On A Razor delivers exactly the sort of all-enveloping, hellish feedback-and-distortion fury that we were expecting from a meeting of the minds between Hototogisu (the duo of Matthew Bower from Skullflower/Total/Sunroof/Ramleh/Mirag and Double Leopards' Marcia Bassett) and Prurient, the hardcore electronics project of Dominick Fernow (who also spends his time knifing eardrums with the blackened noise rock of Vegas Martyrs and Ash Pool's primitivist black metal guzz). This massive collaboration was recorded live, and split into three tracks - "Flashing Like The Void", "Snail On A razor", and "This Is Now" - howling storms of low-frequency distortion swirling together with vicious strains of metallic feedback and mighty droning guitar amplifiers unleashing tidal waves of crushing hum across endless Stygian fields. Now, Hototogisu's massive feedback fogs are pretty heavy and crushing on their own, but when you incorporate Prurient's violent shafts of high-frequency feedback, ripped-apart percussion and maniacal howling vocals, everything turns into a huge mass of mangled guitar noise and shrieking ambient dronemetal ragas, utterly black and earthshaking, huge clouds of malevolent murky skree, beautiful and brutal. Snail On A Razor will most likely find favor with anyone who dug Skullflower's last album Tribulation, as the vibe here is similiarly menacing and blown-out, but Marcia Bassett's thick FX and Prurient's violent aggression turn this into something even more psychedelic and stonerized, a druggy, almost-blacknoise assault. Psychotic screams and howling voices careen through the blackness. Grinding, rumbling riffs float like gargantuan slabs of obsidian buzz in the distance. Monstrous blasts of feedback swoop through endless wind tunnels and shimmering drones spin crystalline in midair....fuck, there's even a couple parts of Snail On A Razor that could pass for something from blacknoise architects Stallagggh. Which means that as formless and drifting as this triptych is, this shit really heavy. Limited edition pressing of 1,000 copies.

MP3 SAMPLE: "This Is Now" (excerpt)
MP3 SAMPLE: "Flashing Like The Void" (excerpt)

HUMAN HOST Exploding Demon CD $8.98 MT6

Baltimore's total-damage theatrical casio punk collective Human Host follow up 2004's Invisible Arteries with this new full length of mutant psych-punk and cosmic casio jams lit up with blasted drone improv. Originally formed from the ashes of popular basement punx Charm City Suicides, the Human Host's now sheer numbers (the Host lists no less than twelve people in their lineup!) allows for an eclectic quest through loose but strangely (and I mean strangely) catchy tunes with lyrics that seem lifted from some obscure 70's prog gatefold sleeve shot through with their peculiar spritiual inflection. Human Host's lysergic avant pop muck busts noisy casio chaos and tweaked keyboard lines with primitive beats,spacey electronics, a "testifying" vocalist, chewy heavy lo-fi acid dirges, even a quick fragment of blastbeat-overload grindcore....the really abstract sounds get into full on freeform drone territory, pretty pastoral drift strewn with chimes and minimal percussion and gauzy,floating keys. It's sort of a psychic amalgam of No Neck Blues Band, a thoroughly avant-garde Ween, quick blips of brutal power violence, art-damaged DIY hardcore aesthetics, Animal Collective...or a punk rock re-imagining of Amon Duul infected with the Load Records brand of dayglo brain damage, with weird production techniques. Either way you slice it, it's pretty rad. Jewel case packaging with stoned space invaders artwork.

HUMAN HOST Invisible Arteries CD $6.98 MT6

This Baltimore band (which arose from the remnants of "basement violence pioneers" Charm City Suicides) deliver their debut full length, Invisible Arteries, a bizarre mix of zonked deconstructed HipHop tantrums, thoroughly destroyed motorik garage rock, gnarly,fried punk-psychedelia, tribal-esque percussion and epic group chants, woozy electronic pop, and pretty acoustic folktronica, using all sorts of low-fi musical equipment, Casio keyboards, toys, etc, and with a lead singer who sounds like a deranged, fire-and-brimstone gospel preacher proclaiming surreal visions of ghost ships, ogres, dolphins, and more. Very weird and very cool. CD comes in a plastic sleeve with Xeroxed cover and inserts.

HUNTING LODGE Energy Czar CD $11.98 SuperFi

These mushmouthed heirs to the throne left vacant by The Birthday Party emerge with this 12 song album of wrecked noise-punk damage dropkicked straight into your face from note one. The zonked illustrations that cover the booklet and case are an indicator of the weirdness these guys traffic in, but it didn't really hit me until the sixth song, "I Am Feudal Japan", just how fucked up their take on noisy hardcore is. This album really rips. Hunting Lodge's sound is a car wreck of rock solid mutant blues