The Batlord Likes Scuzzy, Low-Rent Metal, and You Should Too
 

Well, I'm in need of another outlet apart from my main journal since that's gonna be taken up with other things for the foreseeable future. I suppose I could restart my other two journals, but...meh. I don't feel like ****ing around with moderator queues at the moment. I'd rather just ripoff Zer0's "50 Indie/Alternative Albums You Should Listen To" thread.

So, I loves me some raw, ugly, sloppy metal. Metal made by and for brain-dead cretins who are probably wearing mullets as we speak. Metal with trashy lyrics, bad production, more energy than good taste, all that good stuff. There are plenty of great metal bands that make awesome music through high-minded experimentation, technical wizardry, or what-have-you, but the ultimate goal of metal is to be loud, and sometimes it's good to just forget all the bull****, unplug your brain, and headbang to some gloriously ****ty metal made by bands who probably can't even spell "sophistication" and would probably beat up anyone who could.

So, I'm gonna write about some albums that follow my arbitrary guidelines of what constitutes "scuzzy, low-rent metal". I'm gonna try to throw in a variety of old and new bands, and well known and unknown bands, to keep things interesting. If that wasn't clear then I don't care. I just spent ten minutes on that and I'll be damned if I'm gonna spend any more time on this ****.

Motörhead: Motörhead - 1977

I thought about doing Venom first, but then I was like, "Dude...Motorhead," and I thought that that made a lot of sense. I mean come on, Motorhead are the grand daddies of loud, raw, ugly metal and deserve to be the first mention. The easiest way out would seem to be writing about Overkill or Ace of Spades, but since this is a thread about scuzzy metal, then I should go for something even scuzzier than those two. Their debut fits the bill beautifully.

It's certainly not their best album, and it's certainly not their most accomplished, but don't let that fool you, this album has everything that made Motorhead great...just in it's infant stage. Just take the glorious ****tiness of their cover of "Motorhead" from Lemmy's old band Hawkwind. They just stripped it down, sped it up, and recorded it. What punk band hasn't done the same thing with the only result being that you end up realizing that the original was played at the correct speed? But "Motorhead" is just a blast of pure amphetamines that encapsulates everything that is Motorhead in three minutes and is a preview of the next three decades to come. Brilliant.

But for the most part, the songs on here only hint at future greatness. This is really just ugly biker rock that has been stripped of all prog pretensions, AOR prettiness, or anything else that could give this album even a hint of class, and then revved up by the Clash and the Sex Pistols. It's also the pure beating heart of rock'n'roll. I can just imagine them playing "White Line Fever" in some shit-stained pub at twelve in the morning: there's a Hell's Angel holding some guy up by his shirt with his left hand, and wailing on his face with his right; his buddy is sitting next to him and trying to ignore the altercation and watch the football game on TV while stuffing his face with stale peanuts; the barkeep is considering stopping the fight, but only if he has too, he has twenty bucks on the other guy after all; and in the back, behind a chicken wire fence to protect from flying beer bottles, plays Motorhead. See that puddle of urine in the corner? They did that.

You mean like this?


Helmet "In The Meantime" - YouTube

What about some IRISH scuzzy, unpretentious metal?

...and/or this?


SACRED REICH - Surf Nicaragua - YouTube

You should also check out Zoetrope. My buddies now defunct band.

Music doesn't have to be sophisticated to be good, so I'm not really with you on calling these bands low-rent. I'll play along though since I know exactly what kind of music is going to be posted in this thread.

Die. And **** Ireland.

Most thrash doesn't quite cut it for this thread. Much of it, aggressive or not, is just far too polished for that. Sacred Reich might not exactly be polished, but they're also not quite what I'm looking for here.

"Good" and "low-rent" are not mutually exclusive terms. If they were the vast majority of punk would be "bad".

I'm not really into categorizing music as much as most people, so I'll sit and watch as the Lord of The Bats unveils his unworldly knowledge before his minions. He is but a fair and a kind Lord.

Slayer: Haunting the Chapel EP - 1984

This is an obvious choice for me, and a good way to illustrate some of my criteria for "scuzzy, low-rent metal". Anything from Reign In Blood on is just too polished. Not that there's anything wrong with that. The debut would apply, but it lacks that raw ugliness that is all over this and Hell Awaits. And this beats out Hell Awaits simply because it's more primitive. So, Haunting the Chapel...

I think this EP is the only time that Slayer ever truly crossed over into full-on, first-wave black metal. It all starts with "Chemical Warfare", quite possibly Slayer's darkest song of all time. From the word go you are assaulted with a wall of raw, heads-down, guitar riffing, from which all of the pretty melodies from Show No Mercy have been removed. Tom Araya's hateful growl then belches forth from the dark abyss, and the ugliness is complete. The stripped-down production, heavy on reverb, gives this a dense, claustrophobic atmosphere, that truly makes this song a masterpiece of early black metal. The next two songs that make up this EP are much the same, if not quite as monumentally brilliant as "Chemical Warfare". It's a shame they charge full album price for this EP over at FYE or I'd have bought this years ago. **** FYE.

Low-rent, gloriously ****ty, whatever. You're still calling the music ****ty, which it isn't.

sorry man, you insult my country this is what ya get!

Dude, "gloriously ****ty" is a perfect way to describe bands like Venom and early Slayer. I don't see the problem.

Coffinworm: When All Became None - 2010

Coffinworm are pretty much the bastard love child of a hate**** between Celtic Frost and Electric Wizard. Black metal meets doom and they sort of settle in the middle with misanthropic, nihilistic sludge. They pretty much have two moves: they can hit you with some quality stoner doom droning, where the music is awash in a morass of seething distortion, further muddied by the dense, claustrophobic production; or they can bring on the Celtic Frost and rock out in a surprisingly catchy manner. Either way, the sheer heaviness is such that if this album was around a decade ago the terrorists wouldn't have needed planes. They're definitely primitive, and I imagine that they'll likely refine their formula given time (they only have this, a demo, and a split to their names), but for right now, they're gloriously hideous.

The vocals are a bit different I suppose, the balls out screaming wouldn't be out of place on a hardcore record, but with the death growls that the vocalist also uses one could perhaps say that he also wouldn't be entirely out of place on a deathcore record either...not a polite thing to say surely, but true nonetheless. Be that as it may, he definitely brings the misanthropy, but the vocals are rather low in the mix on this, which isn't surprising for this kind of band, and it really gives the impression that they're rising up from the depths of the oozing sludge river that is the music, intent on dragging you under to be consumed by your own self-hatred. Sweet.

If you don't like Venom then you're a bitch. Straight up. I'm looking at you, Trollheart. These cretins are pretty much the poster boys for this thread. They're so low-rent that the women can stay for free so long as they let the fat, smelly landlord crawl on top of them once a week. I love, love, love me some Venom. The consensus is pretty much that Black Metal is their best album, and while I'm not going to dispute that, I chose Welcome to Hell because, somehow, someway, Black Metal actually has the faintest touch of class and shows some kind of understanding of atmosphere and drama, whereas this ugly, ugly garbage is just a completely unredeemable barrage of punk/metal noise.

The formula here is pretty simple: take Motorhead, fail to take Motorhead, make your best approximation of Motorhead, still do that so poorly that it's possible to not even notice how much it sounds like Motorhead, cover it in a layer of filthy distortion, amateurishly shout puerile lyrics about Satan, and sit back as the next three decades of metal become inexplicably influenced by your objectively terrible crap. Venom are just brilliant.

Venom suck!
Trolleart. Bitch. Apparently. :D

Venom rule and you like watching dogs have sex.

Some bands have the bad luck to come around just a few years too early and then get swept under by the arrival of a new musical movement. This is the curse of Omen. In the early-to-mid eighties thrash metal hadn't yet taken over the world and bands were still trying out their own ideas to take the NWOBHM to the next level. Bands as different as Jag Panzer, Armored Saint, and Whiplash all had very different takes on this concept, and Omen was another such. A few years later and they probably would have been a thrash metal band, but in this climate they were speed/power metal.

It might sound odd to put a power metal band on this thread, but hear me out. They may be power metal, but like I said, if they'd come around a couple years later they'd have been a thrash band. They're not Helloween, and while they are certainly melodic, they're intent is obviously to kick as much ass as possible, and aren't particularly concerned with subtlety or grandiosity. Just kickass riffs and speed. Conceptually, though they do in fact kick mucho asso, they're not really much more than a faster, slightly lobotomized version of Iron Maiden. Creativity isn't too high, but the quality more than makes up for it. Lyrically they're not much better. Pretty much just straight Conan-style fantasy. Songs like "Dragon's Breath", "Die By the Blade", and the brilliantly titled "Be My Wench" give away their mentality.

If you're a fan of Helstar or Jag Panzer then you totally need this band in your life. They'll totally make your month.

I'd love to put up a cover for this album, but even in a spoiler I imagine that it'd violate the rules of this site. Besides, I'm not sure whether looking it up on a library computer might get me registered as a sex offender, but I'm not willing to find out. Even looking up the Youtube videos I had to do some quick scrolling down. I like to live dangerously.


I'm usually not the biggest grindcore fan, and goregrind is usually even worse. Just noise, and goregrind is for the most part incompetent noise. I love Gorerotted though. It's not because they somehow elevate grind or do anything new or anything. Quite the opposite in fact. They're about as original as any one of hundreds of other bands of their ilk. So they ain't exactly a revelation or anything, but they're about as accessible and fun a grindcore band as you're ever going to come across. That's the thing about Gorerotted that I dig, they're a goregrind band, but they're just as committed to having a good time in the worst possible taste as they are to brutality. The healthy dose of legitimate death metal also helps. Saying they sound like a grind version of early Cannibal Corpse wouldn't be entirely unfair actually.

They're also another band who's song titles tells you exactly what they're about. Any goregrind band worth their salt is going to have purposely offensive, puerile, and disgusting song titles, but Gorerotted give their's a little twist by using amusing rhymes or alliteration: "Bed 'Em Behead 'Em", "Put Your Bits In a Concrete Mix", and "Severed, Sawn and Sold as Porn" are all deserving of some kind of award for inspired idiocy (I totally stole that joke from Metal Hammer, but **** them).

Nice thread and I think your thread title is spot on.

Thanks. I considered "Music to Kill Cute, Fuzzy Animals To", but I pussed out. Actually I thought of it ten seconds ago, but I just felt like lying.

You were lying! Somebody on here would give you 5 years for that type of crime.

Death: Scream Bloody Gore

Death's later works might have been the height of technical/progressive death metal, but early on they were dirtier than a whore's underwear. This, their debut, is probably my favorite of their's and is everything that I love about eighties extreme metal. It's just right in that sweet spot between black, thrash, and death metal where it's raw, simple, ugly, and brutal. Nothing pretty or subtle about this album, just pure awesomeness.

Chuck Schuldiner was one of the best DM vocalists of all time, his voice is a hideous rasp that, along with the heavy hardcore punk influence, really propels the music at a breakneck pace with bags of energy. And speaking of hardcore, I remember hearing that some members of an earlier Death line-up left to form Repulsion who would go on to release the first ever grindcore album, Horrified, and while Scream Bloody Gore isn't grind, it's definitely got many of the same influences and isn't at all shy to go into a proto-blast-and-grind mode that isn't a million miles away from Napalm Death at times.

R.I.P. Chuck.

Meh. More a cat person really! :p:

And oi! Where are my list of poseur metal bands I asked for? Tipper Gore hasn't made you her bitch, has she? Say it ain't so!!! :yikes:

Gross.

It's on the way. I just need to tweak it.

I get where you are coming from but I would say that 99% of Metal is too polished for this sort of thread but here is some stuff that may tick the boxes:

Not quite Punk and not quite Metal, Infest are one of my favourite bands of all time and have one of the dirtiest sounds I have ever heard. I have mentioned them a few times on MB but **** it, they are worth it:


Denial Fiend:

Ex members of Death in here.

Want some Garage Rock?:

This from an album and not a bad live gig!

Not much Metal. Apologies. Good call on Gorerotted though. Only Tools and Corpses is a great album. Great album title too!

There's no problem, call it whatever you want.

I just think it's silly to refer to music you think is good as "****ty".

With that said, good thread. I'm not going trying to derail it.

I agree with you.
And... Death? C'mon, Chuck Schuldiner was never low-rent scuzz.

I think Batlord means raw metal, and he's generalizing it with a term that he's been trying to coin here for a while now. Death's early stuff is pretty raw in all fairness. To me though, production doesn't mean ****. Lots of great music has horse**** production.

True. It's just semantics I guess. The thread title is kind of a scuzzy way to get attention, though. And it's confusing.

Oh wow, how very corny of you.

It isn't confusing, all you're going to find here are albums with raw production and what not.

Thanks, I totally get it now.

Does this count?


Early Man-Feeding Frenzy - YouTube

Early man not know how count!

Glad I could help.

How about this

You know it was kind of a tongue-in-cheek title I thought up in about five seconds. It wasn't meant to be some grand statement. It's just a reference to at least vaguely trashy metal that isn't really meant to be particularly exclusive.


Attention seeking? Me? Never.

Don't take any notice of them, you're more metal than the lot of them put together.

http://www.lowbird.com/data/images/2...mgur-g8axx.gif

Hellhammer: Satanic Rites demo - 1984

Ah, Hellhammer. One of the big three of early black metal along with Venom and Bathory. Basically they just sped up Venom with a little hardcore punk, dirtied it up further with some delightfully abysmal production, and came up with one of the most influential rackets of all time. There was no subtlety to be had with these guys. The best they could manage was to slow down and hit you with a long, doomier version of their faster material, which of course ruled. After an EP they would break up and continue on as Celtic Frost and history knows the rest. I'm not the biggest Frost fan, since at first they were basically just trying to make Hellhammer sound respectable. Hellhammer do not sound respectable, nor should they. They made ugly, primitive noise that doesn't need to be improved.

So if you'd like to annoy your parents and let them know what a moron you are at the same time, then you could do worse than to blast some Hellhammer.