Galloping Coroners
Monday, April 5th, 2010
Jumping Out The World / Instinct / Teach Death A Lesson CD
Alternative Tentacles, 1991
When you think of Jello Biafra, his antagonistic spoken word tirades and cult status as the brain behind the Dead Kennedys are the first thing to come to mind. However, it should also be noted that the man is a fanatically obsessed and rabid collector of music. I once witnessed him tear through the beloved stacks of wax at Love Garden Sounds with the deftness of a librarian on crank, nabbing an armful of choice selections all while bullshitting with the starstruck locals. And if you’ve ever read the second volume of the fantastic RE/Search Incredibly Strange Music books, you’d know exactly how hardcore a vinyl hound he is. So it should come as no surprise that this area of expertise has resulted in some of the more interesting documents of “punk” music from his Alternative Tentacles label, resulting in absolute classics from the Butthole Surfers, Flipper, The Crucifucks, Alice Donut, Victim’s Family, Phantom Limbs, and many more. Yet among all those well-known groups lurk some overlooked monsters. I found this CD reissue of this Hungarian band’s 1988 and 1990 LPs for a measly dollar in a cutout bin years ago and it’s easily one of my favorite records from the entire AT catalog. With over an hour of wild, tranced-out heavy psych glazed with shamanistic howls echoing at High Rise/Mainliner levels in the blissed out format of krautrock disciples like Wooden Shjips, this disc continues to get better—and weirder—with age. Although the Neurot label had the good sense to put out Dancing with the Sun in 2000, these early records have yet to garner the praise they deserve and have remained out of print for quite some time.
DOWNLOAD:
Galloping Coroners - Jumping Out The World+ CD (94.1MB Zip file)
LINKS:
Galloping Coroners website
Galloping Coroners on MySpace
Galloping Coroners page at Neurot Recordings
Loser / Cooking With Gas 7″
Wrapping up the Pain Teens theme this week, here’s a post-Pain Teens project from guitarist Scott Ayers which extended his layered, noise-damaged psychedelia into a slightly more experimental realm. Years of sampling and tape loop manipulation elevated Ayers’ masterfully stitched together compositions to a whole new level, as demonstrated on the B-side track, “White Bronco” where news clips of Dan Rather make a perfect compliment to the tense pulse of violin and percussion. His sinister edge is softened with a little humor — albeit very dark humor — as the A-side is a molestation of Jimi Hendrix’s “Hey Joe” tweaked to lampoon the debacle of the O.J. Simpson media circus. My edition of 1000 is hand-numbered #32 of 1000, and I suspect all are numbered #32 since that was O.J.’s jersey number.
My last posting hit the spot, so here’s another single from the notorious Pain Teens. Perhaps we’ll make this Pain Teens week to help meet my self-imposed minimum quota of 4 postings a month. I’ve got lots of their stuff to devastate you with, such as this dizzying 45. “Sacrificial Shack” once again finds the Pain Teens knee deep in the horrors of humanity with a nauseating, yet somehow seductively swirling track that paralleled the early ’90s fascination with serial killers and mayhem. It was released the same year The Silence of the Lambs hit theaters after all. The flipside is a fantastic cover of a Zeni Geva song, funneling the Japanese band’s oppressively pounding primal riffs through buzzing, woozy layers of noisy muck.
There’s something undeniably appealing about sinister music, especially when it comes to rock, and it doesn’t get much more sinister than the Pain Teens. Dark, disturbing, and steeped in the hazy, narcotic fog of Houston, Texas, their music has the acid-fried punk psyche of Chrome plus the weirdo noise experimentation of fellow Texans The Butthole Surfers tightly wound held together with an industrial-sized, relentlessly bombastic rhythm section. Those elements alone make the Pain Teens a fairly interesting band, but the real power of their sound comes from singer Bliss Blood, who’s disarming, female vocals prevent them from being just another off-putting band of testosterone-laden misanthropes. In fact, without her voice and the perfectly assembled layers of pounding noise, riffs, and tape loops, it’d be hard for anyone but the dimmest of sickwads to subject themselves to their tales from the darkest side of humanity. Just dig the seductive qualities of the 