Thursday, August 10, 2006
Various - King Kong
Various King Kong #3 7" (King Kong, 1994)
The early 90s, pre-garage rock revival, could be a pretty dire slog for younguns lookin' for riffs 'n kicks. Alot, ALOT, of bands chose two paths. One: either super-duper serious, ponderous and full of themselves (and really, really drugged out), or two: goofy-tunes punkeroos who mixed shitty hardcore-emo with quasi-personal political lyrics. Oh, and the ongoing worshipping of late-period Husker Du, that would about cover the rest of what you could actually find at a store. The Brainbombs (from Sweden) could have fallen into that first camp, the super-serious sloggers except they pulled themselves free of the sludge-trudge with the magic of RIFFS. And 'Funhouse'-era skronking chaos. And a perverse GG Allinesque obsession with street whores and big sharp knives as a ready substitute for their cocks...so over-the-top despondent that it achieves for this correspondant a 'Get Out of Jail Free' card due to the fact that the band itself is so so alive and exciting that the heavily-accented vocals just act like another dissonant aspect of the sonic mix, ie; I don't pay close attention to them. Really, I don't think the misogyny of this largely studio-bound bunch of Scando miscreants will add one single dollop of actual misery to the world.
Enough apologia. There is a singles comp of these guys on the Load label (oh, they mastered one 45 at the wrong speed on that, aaaaaaah) that somehow missed this track from 1994, with our antiheroes the Brainbombs doing a nifty little Chrome cover for this Euro mag-with-7' EP series called King Kong. For those of you who acquired the Load comp, here's the missing piece of the puzzle.
Our Scando friends the Brainbombs are going through a little namedrop-revival these days, based partly on their insistance on releasing really good new records, partly on the continued discovery of the keeno-nesss of their past early 90s efforts, which are currently out of print but not too difficult to find as of today (the full lengths anyway). Here's hoping that someone muscles up and reissues their magnum opus, the 'Burning Hell' LP, which has more sheer nauseating riffs than Amrep managed as a label for the entire 1990s. -Ryan W.
// posted by W/S @ 8:10 AM 
