Gratuitous Grindcore Gross-Out Gimps' Glade and Guns Get Guffaws

A A A Comments By Phil Freeman Tuesday, Sep 13 2005

The most common initial reaction to Agoraphobic Nosebleed's music is openmouthed shock, followed by gales of laughter. Jay Randall and partner Scott Hull make mash-up grindcore, throwing movie dialogue and analog synth noise atop Gatling gun machine beats and ferocious guitar riffs and stirring it all into a sludgy hair ball of gratuitous, hilarious headfuckery. Like Dave Wyndorf and Rob Zombie, Randall (who writes most of the band's lyrics and, presumably, the track titles) realizes that metal is a worldview. Unlike them, he believes that worldview can be perfectly expressed in a 27-second song called "Death Takes a Shit 2."

photo: W. Gosselin

Death takes a shit.

Details

Agoraphobic Nosebleed
Bestial Machinery: Discography, Vol. 1
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Stream "One More Drink"
Stream "Sex on the Flag" (Windows Media)

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The Nosebleed's 2002 release Frozen Corpse Stuffed With Dope was the Paul's Boutique of grindcore: a hyper-referential, impossibly dense barrage of samples, blast beats, answering machine messages, and incomprehensibly bellowed rants that, unlike just about all their peers' efforts, could be listened to all the way through, revealing more with each replay. Their only subsequent new release, the 100-track, three-inch CD Altered States of America, was somewhat inevitably disappointing, despite instant classics like "A Clown Pointing a Gun at a Small Dog (Reprise)."

Bestial Machinery (136 songs, 77 minutes, two CDs) gathers early seven-inches, comp tracks, and demo tapes. The material can't compare to their later brilliance, but the track titles are still comedy gold: "Ritalin Attack," "Recovering Contraband From a Constricted Airway," "Gratuitous Wound Photos," "Hate Disguised as Legislation," "Black Ass, White Dick," "Glade, a Straw, and a Sandwich Bag," "Morphine Constipation," "My Life Is a Money Pit," "The Executioner Vs. the Sodomite." Not to mention "Fuck Your Soccer Mom."

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