2012/03/04

Fuck... I'm Dead / Vaginal Carnage / Captain Cleanoff / The Kill live shit

Let's start back off with a bang.

Back around the turn of the millennium, I was an awkward teenager with few friends, living in a bullshit seaside resort town in the south of England that completely lacked any sort of punk or metal scene whatsoever, let alone grind or noise. Consequently, I spent as much time on the internet as our finances and primitive dial-up connection would allow - back then it was a pay-by-the-minute deal, 'cause my family couldn't afford one of those new-fangled cable/broadband connections. Downloading one three-minute mp3 from a band's website took the best part of half an hour. I spent a lot of time in chatrooms with other dorks from around the world, while we all talked about how kvlt we were. Dumb days, to be sure, but it led to me being in possession of this great little tape.

I heard a couple of songs from Fuck... I'm Dead's demo tape thanks to some old webzine or something, and was raving about them in a chatroom when some dude from Australia told me he had these live recordings of F...ID and a few other Aussie grind bands of the time... as well as a videos of F...ID and The Kill, which I sadly don't have in digital form (I think the VHS is somewhere in my parents' attic). We agreed a trade and he sent me this tape and the video in return for four or five taped copies of CDs I owned. He also sent me his own band Arbitrator's self-released MCD, which is some great experimental death metal. We've got (mostly) complete live sets from four of the best in the post-Y2K Aussie grindcore scene, plus there were 10 minutes or so left at the end of each side so he threw on some of his favorite songs from the Catasexual Urge Motivation album, The Encyclopedia Of Serial Murders. All the live sets were recorded at The Arthouse in Melbourne in 2001.

Fuck... I'm Dead, for a short while there, seemed to be everyone's underground darlings. The weird name ("must have come up with that during a multiplayer session of Goldeneye 64," commented a friend) probably helped. They put out a demo tape limited to just 100 copies, then self-released a split 7" with Sanitys Dawn on guitarist Dave's No Escape label. Then Razorback signed them for a CD, and they seemingly had a ton of other released planned, but only a split CD with Engorged came out as far as I'm aware. There was a live CD/DVD a few years later, but I don't think they've done any studio releases for about 10 years now, which is a shame. For those unfamiliar, they play(ed) a somewhat death metal tinged form of grind - I guess you could call it deathgrind if you wanted to sound like an idiot - which was characterized by the use of a drum machine. I was never really sure why they used a drum machine, since their vocalist Jay is a great drummer himself. Anyway, they play 16 songs with some nice banter from Jay in between, studio recordings of all the songs can also be found on the Bring On The Dead CD. Recorded May 19th, 2001.

Vaginal Carnage were a very underrated goregrind band that didn't exist for long - they split up when the vocalist passed away in 2004. They released an awesome MCD on No Escape, other than that I don't know what they put out, but I'm sure there must have been a demo tape at some point. They play 12 songs, and this set is from the same night as the F...ID set. Most of these songs are not on the Dildo Detention MCD on No Escape, so this is a great recording to have. Four of the twelve songs don't have titles on the tracklisting I was sent, and are not on Dildo Detention for me to be able to fill in the gaps. If anybody downloading this can let me know the names of any of these songs, please do - I'm totally OCD about my mp3 tags...

Closing side A of the tape is the song Supraliminal Psychosadistic Motivation by CUM.

First up on side B is one of my absolute favorite grind bands of this millennium, Captain Cleanoff from Adelaide. Totally awesome fast-as-shit old-school grind with some amazing riffs. They've put out a split 7" with Open Wound, a self-titled MCD on No Escape, then after a long period of inactivity a full-length on Obscene Records, I think. And now there's a new full-length upcoming on Blastasfuk. Surely a few other releases that I'm forgetting, too. Anyway, this set was recorded before the self-titled MCD came out, so it's mostly pre-MCD stuff with a few songs from the MCD too. The tracklisting doesn't have titles for some of the newer songs, but I filled in the gaps by checking the MCD tracklist. This recording has 12 songs, but I think they played 13 on the night - if I remember rightly, this recording ends with the vocalist saying "we've got one more". Oh well, 12 songs is 1200% better than none. Recorded May 19th, 2001.

Last live recording supplied by The Kill, and recorded on September 7th, 2001. The guitarist from this band runs the Blastasfuk label, and that's a pretty good indication of what The Kill sound like I guess. They've put out a demo, an MCD on No Escape, and a live MCD and studio CDEP on Blastasfuk, plus a few other splits and things which recycle those same recordings. This set was recorded when Neil from Undinism was still in the band, so well before the MCD came out. 15 songs, mostly from the demo but a couple from the MCD. I guess this was the first time they ever played Blown Noise, and they fucked it up a couple of times before Neil decides to skip it and go on to the next song, but Roby and Jay (yeah, the vocalist from F...ID is also the drummer in The Kill) overrule him and they nail it on the third try. I used the demo and MCD for the song titles, so a few of them are different to what's written on the 'sleeve'. It's possible that the whole demo is included in this set, but I'm too lazy to check now.

The tape is topped off with four more CUM songs.

So, yeah... this is an upload I'd been sitting on for a while, because it's all unreleased stuff - premium content! - but I guess it's a nice one to use to relaunch the blog. No proper cover, but I scanned the tracklisting that was sent to me with the tape and have included that because hey, why not. It's a hefty download, and a full 93 minutes long, but it's worth your time... and hey, you don't have to listen to the whole thing at once.

Sorry for rambling on so much! I'll try and make the next one shorter...

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

reup!!!