Iron Lung have also just birthed Nin-Gen, Rashomōn’s second 12-inch – one-sided, like the first, with an etching on the B which you can invite people to come up and see – and it’s faster, frothier and thrashier than X = Pathogen X, that 2018 vinyl debut. Certain guitar parts, ‘Death In Disguise’ for example, beat their chest in Cro-Mag-ish fashion, and if you dig the ‘holy terror’ sound coined by Cleveland’s Integrity… well, you probably know Gehenna already in that case, but their rep as a more chaotically self-medicated riposte to Integrity holds up on Negative Hardcore, with even more extreme metal savagery than before. In the best way, this continuation of Gehenna’s trademark blackened wreckhead blitz sounds banged out and dog-rough, like it was done in a day and then lost in life’s fug.Ĭrawling with blastbeats, divebombs and bestially blown-out production touches more akin to, say, Teitanblood than any hardcore qua hardcore outfit, if it wasn’t for an additional spate of moshers’-delight breakdowns and most of these songs being under two minutes long, I daresay most fresh listeners would just figure Gehenna were a straight-up metal band. Whatever the backstory, this is no Chinese Democracy-esque carry-on from the Nevada-based belligerents. Negative Hardcore is the third LP by Gehenna in a hair under 30 years, and mysteriously long in its conception: the band recorded it seven years ago and had sketched out a linkup with Iron Lung Records – fulfilled here – before that. ‘Why’, whose music splits the difference between The Jesus Lizard and industrial metal, is a denouncement of America’s homelessness crisis which asks its questions in a childlike register: “Why do people have to live outside, when there are buildings all around us with heat on and no one inside?” I say ‘childlike’ not to belittle, rather to concur that the issue is fundamentally this simple, could be fixed in weeks by identifiable individuals, and anyone who tries to argue otherwise is an earthbound demon. You might find this aesthetic offputting, or you might recall the various Big Black and No Trend records which did something similar. There aren’t jokes on God’s Country, exactly, but a degree of inferred levity preventing the chosen subject matter from seeming too harrowing, even when it objectively is. The group’s public image – such as it is – indicates Ron, vocalist Raygun Busch, guitarist Luther Manhole and bassist Stin don’t take themselves gravely seriously. (Two of the more prominent connecting nodes between those scenes, Godflesh and Helmet, are relevant indeed to any discussion of Chat Pile.) Ably self-produced, God’s Country is tonally grotesque but betrays its members’ MTV-raised sensibilities: Chat Pile drummer Cap'n Ron (all members are at least part-pseudonymous) plays an electronic kit, which works rather well in the mix and which I’m not sure I’d have twigged without being told. By no means obviously populist music, God’s Country nevertheless locates a sound primed for a certain type of modern rock listener.Įssentially, the album plots a continuum between the sort of music that was called ‘pigfuck’ in the 1980s and not so much since – nihilistic, detuned, (mostly) American – and the more commercially inclined plains of 90s alt-rock and metal. From a distance, it does seem like the amount of attention foisted on this four-piece band’s morbid, downtuned histrionics was unusually concentrated around their debut’s ‘drop’, as opposed to a more gradual accumulation of approving talk – Chat Pile’s chat pile, so to speak. Chat Pile, from Oklahoma City, describe the late-July release day for their debut album God’s Country (The Flenser) as “crazy”.
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