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There are only four relevant releases this week, the signal that we’re entering the winter new release slump. 2011 has been a great year for releases, so this is fine by me. Check it out after the jump.
Seth Putnam was one of metal’s great provocateurs and most colorful personalities. That’s why, even if you were never a huge Anal Cunt fan — and I profess, I am grateful to AxCx mostly for serving as my introduction to Scott Hull — Putnam’s death this past June feels like a profound loss to the community. Not many people will ever make an impression the way that guy did.
Now Realpse is getting to release a tribute to the man, the myth, the legend, in the form The Old Testament, a collection of demos, 7″s, EPs, and other assorted Anal Cunt rarities. And two tracks from that compilation — a seven-and-a-half minute demo which is apparently AxCx’s first, and a song called “Riverbottom Nightmare Band” — are now available for your listening pleasure over at The Deciblog. I’m not really gonna try to describe the music for you, because if you know Anal Cunt, you already have some sense of what to expect, and if you don’t, well… you just kinda need to listen, because Putnam and company were truly one of a kind and no words can really tell you what you’re in for. This shit was, uh, unique. Yeah, let’s say “unique.”
Headbang here. The Old Testament comes out November 22 via Relapse.
-AR
File under “things I never thought I’d hear:” Anal Cunt covering Buckckcherry. But apparently now-deceased Anal Cunt frontman Seth Putnam (R.I.P.) was actually a huge Buckcherry fan. Check out this January 2011 interview from Brave Words & Bloody Knuckles:
Q: Fuckin A’ is a straight cock rock glam album… have you always been interested in sleazy glam Sunset Strip music?
A: “We were backstage on tour in 1996 and (guitarist) Josh Martin and I had the idea. We thought of calling the band Fuckin’ A. it’s been on the back burner for like 14 years. I saw MÖTLEY CRÜE in 1984 when they opened for OZZY OSBOURNE on the Shout At The Devil tour. And I liked the second BUCKCHERRY album a lot. I really like the first two Mötley Crüe albums. During a 2001 tour, we bought the second Buckcherry album on tour and listened to it. We’d start listening to it and do a bunch of crystal meth and crank it in the van. It would get us all psyched up to go on stage. The bad songs on Buckcherry albums are really good. In Japan in 2004 we’d crank Buckcherry on headphones and were doing crystal meth the whole time. Every other album Buckcherry has done is pretty terrible. The third album has one good song. The first album isn’t that good. The Buckcherry songs I really like are ‘Whiskey In The Morning’, and ‘Ridin’’.”
So, uh… there you go: Buckcherry, great for doing crystal meth to. Here’s Anal Cunt covering “Whiskey in the Morning.”
-VN
Best commercial ever?
ANYWAY, here’s how we filled our time this week:
Next week is a big one — we’re debuting new tracks from two of our most favoritest bands, a video from one of our childhood heroes, reviewing a very, very, VERY highly anticipated new record (Hint: We definitely discussed it this week!), and we’ll have some other surprises in store for you, too. See ya then!
-AR
While we continue to mourn the passing of Anal Cunt mainman Seth Putnam, Metal Injection posted the below memo, in which the band instructs the sound guy for whatever venue they were playing that night on just exactly how they’d like their monitors mixed. And it’s pretty great. The bit about how vocal levels should be “just a cunt hair above the others” is obviously terrific, especially because whomever typed this up (I’d assume it was Putnam himself, but who knows) decided that the words “cunt hair” needed to be italicized for emphasis; but my favorite part is definitely the instruction that guitarist Josh Martin “doesn’t want to deal with this shit.” I imagine that somewhere Vince has a similar memo which he passes out to people that tells them “Axl doesn’t want to deal with this shit,” only he’s not talking about sound levels, he’s talking about fucking everything.
Check out the document after the jump!
Because two young upstart blogs have put together a few for your listening pleasure. I haven’t had a chance to check any of these out myself yet, but, like the headline says, they’re free, so it seems worth mentioning, because what have you got to lose, right?
Here are the deets:
Seth Putnam, best known as the driving creative force behind grind provocateurs Anal Cunt, passed away over the weekend from a heart attack. He was only 43 years old.
No matter what you thought of Anal Cunt, or any of Putnam’s other numerous projects, there’s no denying that the man was a singular personality; most people probably remember the exact first time they heard Anal Cunt, an honor not many artists can claim.
But as MetalSucks’ own Grim Kim reminds us, “no matter how outrageous and controversial his musical career has been, Seth was still a human being with friends and family that loved him.” Our thoughts are with those friends and family now.
-Axl, Vince, and Everyone at MetalSucks
MetalSucks recently polled its staff to determine who are The Top 25 Modern Metal Guitarists, and after an incredible amount of arguing, name calling, and physical violence, we have finalized that list! The only requirements to be eligible for the list were that the musician in question had to a) play metal (duh), b) play guitar (double-duh), and c) have recorded something in the past five years. Today we continue our countdown with Scott Hull of Pig Destroyer and Agoraphobic Nosebleed…
Scott Hull might be the genre’s most verisimilitudinous exmaple of metal, for, surely, there is no one more metal than he. He has a job, so he isn’t dependent on music to make his living, so he has never had to commit that sin which most offends metal fans – the compromise of artistic ideals. And that job just happens to be doing IT stuff for the government, which might not sound interesting, until you hear Hull use the phrase “The classified nature of my work,” at which point you realize that Holy shit Scott Hull knows where you live and what porn you download and the codes for the bombs and you had better not fuck with him.
Of course, while these two facts certainly add to Hull’s metalness, they are far too superficial to be the actual source of his metalocity. For no one would give a hoot about Scott Hull the Government IT Guy who Makes Music on the Side if not for the fact that his guitar playing has the ability to endanger entire species.
Porno grind is a ridiculous genre, and unless you consider a band like Anal Cunt pornogrind (and you really shouldn’t), it’s a genre which has never, at least as far as my experience goes, yielded any bands that are any good — save for one: Lake Bukkake, who might be the single greatest band ever to destroy the NYC underground (and then completely drop off the face of the planet).
And I can’t say that Bear Party — which reader Bassquatch, who recommended them, classifies as “Queercore” — are really a good band. However, I do think they deserve some credit for being an openly gay band in a disappointingly homophobic community. (Especially disappointing when you consider that no style of music is more homoerotic than metal. Sorry, tough guys.)
Apparently the makers of Rock Band are now allowing fans to suggest which songs be included in the time-wasting game’s next iteration. Reads the official Rock Band website:
Request a Song: Got a band or artist you’d like us to know about? A song you’re dying to play in Rock Band? Go ahead—we’re listening…
The page has a form with three fields: Artist Name, Song Title, and Why It Rocks. We could really have some fun with that last one.
Let’s try and get Cannibal Corpse’s “Fucked With a Knife” on the docket for the next Rock Band. Write in the most ridiculous shit possible in the “Why It Rocks” field… how it inspired you to sexually experiment with knives, or some such real-life true stories nonsense. Go here to do so. Because selecting “Fucked With a Knife” at a party would be massively hilarious (and fun to play).
-VN
[Thanks: Adam Muirhead]
Scott Hull is the fuckin’ man dude. Aside from his God-like contributions to Pig Destroyer, Agoraphobic Nosebleed and Anal Cunt (does this dude have a talent for being in bands with awesome names or what?), he also has some kind of top-secret government computer job, which probably means he’s reading this and ordering a wire tap on my phone even as I type this. Or, at the very least, that he’s the one responsible for hacking Metal Sludge. Scott Hull don’t suffer no Enuff Z’Nuff songs.
ANYWAYS, Lambgoat is now reporting that Hull has his first solo album, Requiem, coming out one June 10 in the US and June 16 everywhere else:
“According to Relapse, “Requiem sees Hull explore his long-time love for movies and cinema score in the form of a beautifully crafted piece of work’…
“Advance song titles from the album include: ‘Consequenze,’ ‘Visita all’ospedale,’ ‘Morte sul treno,’ and ‘Il funerale di Bonnie.’”
“Il funerale di Bonnie” is already the best song title I’ve heard all year. The other titles apparently translate to “Visit to the Hospital” and “Died on the Train,” which are, um, well, I dunno.
The audio samples currently avail on Hull’s MySpace page aren’t very grindy or even very metal at all – in fact, that hospital visit track kind of reminds me of a Tangerine Dream song – but I guess there’d be no point making a solo album if it was just gonna sound like Pig Destroyer without J.R. Hayes and Brian Harvey (and Blake Harrison, I suppose).
But here’s the really interesting part of this news: the cover art refers to the album as an “Original Motion Picture Soundtrack.” If Hull is making a movie to go with this music, I’ll pee myself.
-AR
