master

frequently cited along with siege and repulsion as forerunners of grindcore. master recorded a demo in 1985 that was intended for release on combat records, if memory serves. (maybe i'm thinking of death strike, who knows.) combat flaked and the record was shelved, and the demo became one of those things traded endlessly on cassette and probably inspiring a few folks here and there to make even more fucked up noise than they already were.

the material is obviously strong: venom, motorhead and sabbath influences reduced to an even more ridiculously crude and simplistic level, it could probably appeal to the kind of punks that gave bands like amebix, hellbastard and antisect careers. but that production... sounds like it was recorded in a garden shed or something. it's not even worth talking individual instruments - the whole is all you can hear, a roaring, grinding frenzy. not really dissimilar to repulsion but even more single-minded and scathing.

speckmann's 80s career also included war cry, death strike (who shared a song or two with master), funeral bitch, and abomination. and he hasn't stopped since, no matter how much begging we do.

so here are two tracks from the "unreleased 1985 album" (now released by the good graces of from beyond records):

master - re-entry and destruction is almost a blueprint for early napalm death and carcass. several varieties of tubercular vocals doing call and response, and some pitch-shifted gurgling.

master - terrorizer is an instrumental track complete with squealing and incoherent guitar noise. again, the shower stall fidelity probably makes this sound more compelling than it was. but production matters. and yeah, i think jesse pintado's pre napalm death band took their name from this track.

nuclear death

1987 was the year i really got into metal, thanks to someone on KCSB in santa barbara playing metallica. within a year i was tape trading, writing for a zine and buying demos from all over the fucking planet.

one of the first was nuclear death's welcome to the minds of the morbid - transitional forms of metal, discordant and messy one second, sounding like possessed the next; lori bravo's vocals laced the tracks like angel dust, ranting and insane and able to suddenly burst into bizarre operatics (see "the third antichrist," later re-recorded on "for our dead").

i got to know phil hampson, their guitarist, via tape trading and letters - in addition to taping me all sorts of ND ephemera (like the demon cubes), i also first heard demos by vader, cathedral, and autopsy through him.

their third demo came out in 1988. vultures feeding. the band had changed drastically; they had been early adopters of the not-yet dominant grindcore/blastbeat style, but here they really dropped genre signifiers and found the essence of their sound. phil's guitars became arcs and slashes of discordant fuzz. lori's bass, a growling churn like a stomach that's been empty for decades, her vocals becoming more confident and dropping anything like a standard metal delivery. joel whitfield's drumming continued on its bizarre scattering trajectory, the heart of the music - entropy always clawing away at meter, order and form.

their albums are all excellent but vultures feeding will always be the definitive nuclear death recording in my mind. i may post the entire demo at some point, as it (and their first two) are tragically unavailable. (and if anyone out there has the planet cachexial, please get in touch!)

nuclear death - the colour of blood

these days, i think phil and joel (who were both eventually kicked out of ND) are in the fairly awful-looking eroticide. and here's a nuclear death fan page.

samuel prody

A short-lived blues-rock band, whose album attracts no more interest today than it did at the time. Apparently its pretty heavy and freaky, though. - the tapestry of delights

heavy and freaky, indeed. i'm pretty much disinterested in the UK blues-rock boom of the late 60s; at least until the acid started kicking in and the well-worn, standardized blues phrasing started growing in strangely double-jointed, flapping ways. the edgar broughton band and the groundhogs, right?

samuel prody - the band name, not an actual dude - recorded this one album and then, apparently realizing its perfection, stepped away from music forever. reminds me of the psychedelic groundhogs stuff, but prody tended to extend their melody lines out in odd directions and weren't afraid of harmony vocals. probably safe to assume zeppelin's influence is felt in the band's tendency to pound the living hell out of a riff when necessary.

the vocals... well, they aren't bad. a little bit loose with the vibrato, but when he cuts loose and howls it all works out.

should be noted that the first track ("who will buy") is apparently from the musical oliver, and the last ("hallucination") gets into some faux-african 'tribal' drum jamming that might make some squirm.

samuel prody - she's mine