The Northland Rules Supreme with the True Kings of The Heathen People

Scheiße! It's been over a fortnight since I have graced IllCon with my presence it appears. I do sincerely apologize!

You see, I can't help it. I'm a student. And as many of you may be well aware out there, us students - those in the CSU system of "education" at least - are in the throes of finishing last minute projects, papers, assignments; we are finally getting around to visiting our instructors during their office hours; we're pleading, no screw that, we're begging to be given some extra credit to make up for that one time we inadvertently slept through a scheduled class meeting and as a result didn't turn in that supposed assignment; we're in the throes of burning in hellfire and getting swallowed up by the misfortune of poorly made decisions and late night booze-benders...

Wait?! What the @#$% am I talking about??

Basically finals are next week. Excuses, excuses... I know.

Hey, I've been busting my ass the last two weeks trying to put this semester behind me. I have been running off coffee and vitamin water, burritos and ramen, and trying to squeeze in a nap or two whenever possible. So cut me some slack alright?!

That said, I will keep this post brief considering the circumstances.

So what's new in Aegipan's world you ask? In between these academic excursions of mine, random black outs while raging it at the bar, and trying my best to avoid the brown-bottle flu, I have been trying to stay warm. Seriously, I mean it's been freezing-ass cold! Even for up here in remote, bum-fuck-egypt-Humboldt County! I mean, I don't mind the cold generally and usually have a good tolerance for it but part of my problem recently has been it's been too friggin' cold - too cold even to get out of bed! It just makes you want to stay in bed, spike some hot cocoa, and cuddle up with that teddy bear your ex-girlfriend got you a couple Christmases ago while watching reruns of Law & Order.

NOTE: I'm talking Criminal Intent and none of that bullshit "Special Victims Unit" crap...
...I mean detectives Wheeler and Eames are smoking! Who wouldn't want to be arrested by either?

It's been so damned cold that I have reverted to listening to some cold, grim, Norwegian Black Metal as of late. It may not get as cold here as it does in Norway, true, but you get my point.
Recently whilst rummaging through my collection the other evening I came across this but since it is already featured here on IllCon, and mainly to avoid redundancy, I thought I'd share this instead:


Stay true.


As a special treat, and in part for my lack of posts recently but mainly because I favor the Immortal tracks most on this compilation, I thought I'd share this also:


Stay heathen.

Metallum / Last.FM


Stay cold.

Jester Beast - Destroy After Use (1988)

Anybody who's ever tried to start a band knows that one of the most difficult parts is finding a name that's halfway decent and hasn't been taken. It's a daunting proposition, and there are definitely some really great bands who have been marred with shitty names (coughcoughWeekendNachoscoughcough). It really is a shame when a great band is marred with a name that elicits the “no, but really they're actually good” defenses and one of the prime offenders that I've found is Turin, Italy's Jester Beast.

I'm not entirely sure what a “jester beast” would be exactly. Some sort of clown-painted bear? A juggling shark? A dragon that makes balloon animals? It kinda sounds like something that would adorn a black light poster in Spencer Gifts, but that doesn't really clear much up. Nor does the name really fall under the band-naming approach of juxtaposing two or three cool-sounding words regardless of their meaning - “beast” is pretty overused in metal, and clowns, while they may be scary, aren't scary in a particularly metal sort of way. Just because something's creepy or unsettling doesn't mean it needs to be a metal band's name. I fear growing old and dying unloved in some nursing home that smells of urine while an ex-felon nurse is stealing my medication but I don't think Geriatric Abandonment would be a very good band name.

Appellations aside, If you catch Jester Beast at the right point in their existence, they were fucking killer. Their first appearance, a song on 1983's Heavy Metal Made In Italy, sounded like a slightly punk-ish Motley Crue and their first full-length, 1991's Poetical Freakscream (which sounds like a fucking Spin Doctors album title) was pretty standard Anthrax worship, polished and competently performed but lacking any qualities that separated them from the six billion other bands trying to sound like Anthrax in 1991. However, in the years between those two releases, the band put out the Destroy After Use demo which remains one of the best crossover releases that has ever been committed to tape.

This, of course, isn't saying much. Most crossover lacked hardcore's acerbic brevity and metal's dark intensity, treading water in a middle ground of flip-brimmed baseball caps and puffy hi-top Nikes. Jester Beast's demo, however, sounds like some alternate musical universe where DRI and COC got more vicious and frantic with the incorporation of metal rather than turning into shitty thrash-lite or cornball Southern rock (respectively). If all the crossover bands took a page out of the Hellhammer book instead of trying to be the next Metallica, there would be a shitload more bands that managed the frantic brutality of Jester Beast in their prime.

Italy had a strong scene for heavier music during this period, whether metal (Death SS, Dark Quarterer) or punk (Raw Power, Cheetah Chrome Motherfuckers) and while Jester Beast may not have attained the notoriety garnered by many of their contemporaries - though apparently they did have members of hardcore bands like Declino and Negazione and had played shows with Morbid Angel and Cro-Mags amongst others – their demo holds up far better than pretty much any band from the era that attempted to bridge the divide between hardcore and metal.

Would a Jester Beast by any other name thrash as hard? Sometimes we must look past the obvious if we are to find something greater, more pure and terrifying. It may be easy to dismiss a band like this based on name alone (just like it may be easy to harp on them for their terrible-ass name), but their music claws from under the corpse-pile of forgotten metal bands, incapable of being forgotten by anybody who has devoted any effort or time to this means of expression.

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Jester Beast - Destroy After Use

Naked Aggression

I grew up in a small town in southern New Mexico where there was almost nothing to do. Small towns everywhere are like that, and like many social misfits in small towns across the United States (and elsewhere I imagine) I took solace in music that expressed my bitterness and misanthropy. With little else to do I often browsed the music catalogues at my friend's record shop looking for anything categorized under the genre "punk".
So it was that one day I stumbled across two bands in the "N" section and ordered their albums. The more significant of these (to me) was Naked Aggression's Bitter Youth. (Negative Approach was good too, but I really appreciate the radical political content of the former) Although there were some preceding split 7" and EP's Bitter Youth was the first of this Madison, WI anarcho-punk bands full-length LP's and sports a raw urgency to go along with it's radical politics. Plus it has what I think is one of the best punk-rock record covers of all time.

5 Years, a number of recordings later, and now based in California, they released Gut Wringing Machine. It was a further development of their sound and, contrary to the pattern of most punk bands, actually faster and more politically savvy than prior albums. Unfortunately it was also the tragic end of Naked Aggression for shortly after the release of Gut Wringing Machine the bands primary songwriter and accomplished guitarist, Phil Suchomel died. One would think this was the end for Naked Aggression, I did, but apparently not. As I was revisiting these albums yet again recently I did a little research and apparently after a number of years hiatus, the band reformed with some new crew and released some new material before going "dormant" again. We shall see...

Buy Some Bitter Youth

Bitterness

The track listing is a little off on this, but the songs are there and easy to sort out.

 Buy Some Gut Wringing Machine

Wringer

MySpace
Wikipedia

Sunday Night Blues is an Acute Condition

Dang, Sunday night already? That means work for most of us IllCon slobs except for Cobras who lives exclusively off Apocryphon royalties, and school for a not-insignificant segment of the IllCon workforce. Lucky for you, I've culled a trifecta of newish death metal newish releases to kick off your week. The first, The Virally Enthroned's Catharsis, a pitch perfect tech-death effort crafted by your five younger cousins apparently, if their metal-archives photo is any indication. I mean yeah, they may need some image work but I'm a little surprised there isn't more chatter about this band. I guess I shouldn't make fun too hard because this band photo could probably double as a snap of an IllCon staff meeting.

The second, a tardcore slamfest by a Belgian band who decided to call itself Putrified J; I love any band whose name looks like a typo. Putrified J is not to be confused with Putrified, whose debut LP, Spawn of the Dead, just dropped recently and just so happens to shred (evidence to follow). Putrified J has been making the rounds lately on some of those other metal blogs you read, and for good reason. Not only are they giving their album away for free - total bro move - but their low-threshold brutal slamz are just the thing you need to ease into this week and the holiday season that is well nigh near. 12 tracks in under 20 minutes makes this the perfect substitute for your Quiet Storm: Slow Jams tape when it goes missing. Putrified J get bonus points for proclaiming on Facebook that THIS SHIT WONT EVER STOP AND U CANNOT MAKE US!

Truth.

Virally Enthroned - Catharsis

Putrified - Spawn of the Dead

Putrified J - The Last Harvest

Gehenna - Negotium Perambulans In Tenebris

In a previous post, Cobras kicked over a trio of albums by Gehenna – the Norwegian one, the one with keyboards – and gave a fleeting mention to the other Gehenna. Now I don't know how his taste in these things lies specifically, but the other Gehenna, the American one with no keyboards or corpse paint, was always my preferred variant. I'm not gonna do some blow-by-blow comparison of the two, that'd just be a rotten apples-to-rotten oranges situation (though apparently iTunes can't keep the two straight) , but I'll let my choice in Gehennas stand on its own merit.

When I was getting into hardcore and punk in the mid-90s, there was some really killer shit out there, but little of it could touch the bleak mean-spiritedness of Gehenna. Theirs was a fearsome rumble, lacking an exact point of reference. It was heavy as shit, generally fast, and dark as fuck. One can pick out hints of Hellhammer or other proto-death metal bands, but the delivery was far too stripped-down to align itself that strongly with metal. It often got lumped in with the “Holy Terror hardcore” sound – Integrity, Starkweather, et. al. - but was far rougher sounding, eschewing the tough guy vibe of the former and the artiness of the latter (though I do love both bands) in favor of a succession of short, blunt explosions. While the two bands didn't really sound alike, Gehenna sometimes reminds me of Rorschach, in the sense that both bands melded fairly disparate strands of metal and hardcore without falling into the dreaded metalcore trap. It was hostility embodied and it laid waste most other bands that tried to use negativity and edginess as some pose.

Theirs was an existence clouded in rumor and innuendo, with stories of their sketchiness abounding. Growing up in a small town in Virginia, I was pretty far from the thick of things, but tales about the band all being homeless, about them not owning instruments, about singer Mike Cheese stabbing somebody all came down the pipe at some point. One could also call to mind the story of a more recent reunion show where everybody but Mike Cheese quit a week before the show, and rather than tell anybody, he let the show go on and in lieu of a performance, he walked out onstage in front of a sizable crowd, sat down, smoked a joint, ate a burrito, then left. I couldn't attest to the veracity of any of this (though in the days of acquiring albums by sending well-concealed cash, Gehenna's was the first album I never received in return for my hard-earned lawn mowing money), but I can speak for the ferocity of the band's music.

I can't say whether Illcon readers will prefer this to the Euro Gehenna, so to at least bridge the gap a little bit, I included a link to their most metallically-titled release (also the only full-length that's out of print), 2000's Negotium Perambulans In Tenebris, a raging chunk of churning, blackened hardcore that lays waste pretty much any band attempting this particular style. I'm thankful that this band is still putting out albums, but I'm even more thankful that they've sacrificed none of the brutality that made them an unstoppable force in the first place.

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Gehenna - Negotium Perambulans In Tenebris

BALLS!

HEY, Seattle! Go to this benefit for my nephew TANNOTH that had a hernia while thrashing around at the recent Unhalted Genocide show. He literally shit his guts into his nuts. Like, totally not joking, his intestines are in his scrotum.

THREE SPELLS

Holy shit, I didn't realize until just now that today is IllCon's three-year anniversary. Nice. What did you fuckers get me?

Nothing? Awesome.
Well, I got you three albums from Norway's own Gehenna (no, not that one), purveyors of only the finest elven/witchy/Dracula-based black metal that country has to offer. Are you into cheesy, mid-paced, mid-90's, synth-laden forest troll music played by a bunch of dudes (and a chick) wearing capes and shit? Good! Gehenna will be right up your alley, casting forth a etherial web of faerie magick to ensnare all your wildest Ren Faire fantasies! A little too "Opera Man" for you? Tough shit, man. Sometimes corny-ass Ouija board metal with the keyboards turned up way too loud is just what the Hessian soul needs, so far be it from me to deprive you of such Narnian majesties.
Three fucking years, man. Jesus.


FIRST SPELL EP (1994)


Download HERE
Purchase HERE


SEEN THROUGH THE VEILS OF DARKNESS (THE SECOND SPELL) (1995)


Download HERE
Purchase HERE


MALICE (OUR THIRD SPELL) (1996)


Download HERE
Purchase HERE

LOL

Metallum/Last.FM


PS check out this new logo I designed for Illogical Contraption Radio:


I'M A FUCKING GENIUS.