Eugene Robinson threw down the gauntlet on the Deciblog earlier this month and challenged readers to write an essay about the most terrible thing that’s ever happened to them or a song extolling the virtues of the esteemed Oxbow frontman/ Decibel contributor. Some of the essays we received were too damn depressing to reprint here; some of the songs kicked so much ass that it made choosing tough. After reviewing all of the submissions, Mr. Robinson has declared a winner and a runner-up:

Winner!
Kevin Sheets, Hebron, IN
“Eugene The Fightmaster, From Whom a Mere Glance Can Set Churches Ablaze”

Runner-up!
Ian Morris, Santa Rosa, CA
“Eugene”

In case you’re wondering: these musical geniuses also play in their own bands! Check out our winner’s one-man metal project Corpses of Wolf Lake and our runner-up’s electric wizardry in Alab.

In my review of The Great Deceiver’s Life Is Wasted on the Living in the December issue (in stores TODAY!), I got sidetracked by the references to industrial music in the press materials and the mechanized edge to the music and blabbed for a while about industrial metal. I hadn’t even thought about any of these bands in forever, but for a couple of years in high school I had an impressive collection of low-rent Ministry ripoffs. If there was goofy cyberpunk posturing and/or samples of Cenobites and televangelists and shit, I was PSYCHED. Most of this stuff has not aged well at all, and most of it has been deservedly forgotten. I can barely even find YouTube examples for the bands I can remember. Like Skrew:

I owned two albums by that band.

Then there were the bands that got lumped in with industrial metal even though they didn’t incorporate any electronics. Some of these bands (Prong, Killing Joke, Big Black) were instrumental in my discovering stuff like Swans, Unsane, Joy Division, Wire, Chrome, and lots of other shit that is way cooler to namedrop than, like, Chemlab. Treponem Pal were nowhere near the top tier of these pseudo-industrial bands, but they did give the world “Soft Mouth Vagina.” I had to find this song again to confirm that it was as goofy and bizarre as it was in 1989. It absolutely is. “Eet’s a plaze, a plaze to leeve….”

Treponem Pal - Soft Mouth Vagina

In doing a couple of Wikipedia searches to “research” this entry, I discovered that I’m actually a source for the entry on “Industrial rock.” Holy shit, full circle.

Jay Reatard’s Blood Visions was probably my favorite non-metal LP of last year. I was already a fan of his garage-punk band The Reatards (both Teenage Hate and Grown Up Fucked Up are unstoppable) and the more synth oriented Lost Sounds, but Blood Visions corralled his raw punk, garage and power-pop instincts (spread out over multiple side projects) into one cohesive and really solid album. (Plus the cover of “We Who Wait” introduced me to The Adverts, who turned out to be awesome). Jay’s blog is loaded with home recordings and rare tracks from his various projects. Among the demos, acoustic tracks and even an ambient piece is his one foray into extreme metal as part of the short-lived “primitive black metal” project Winter Coffin. Their only recording, “Forest of Blitzkrieg,” is actually pretty credible; sure, the vocals sound like the vocals on the Reatards records, but for me that’s a huge plus.

Winter Coffin - Forest of Blitzkrieg

That Clockcleaner video down there got me revisiting G.G. Allin a little. “Die When You Die” is definitely one of the most-covered G.G. songs (Zeke did it on a fairly recent Relapse 7-inch), up there with “Drink, Fight, Fuck” and “Bite It You Scum” which, I gotta admit, CKY did an OK job with at Hellfest 2003. But my favorite G.G. Allin song is one that you could play in front of your mom, except for the “cream in my jeans” part: “Cheri Love Affair.” It’s practically charming, and really kinda corny, budget Stooges-wannabe cock-rock with hilarious female backups. From Always Was, Is and Always Shall Be, G.G.’s 1980 debut as frontman of The Jabbers, back when was just a regular punk rock guy and not the poo-flinging, self-mutilating sideshow seen on Jerry Springer 10 years later.

EDIT: Because a) I forgot to mention Chemical People’s excellent cover of “Cheri Love Affair” that replaces the female backups with Dave Naz’s bored Cali-dude “Love affair now…” and b) I just found out that Mike Kirkland from Damage (and Prong) played on G.G.’s You Give Love a Bad Name as part of the one-time studio band The Holy Men. Whoa.

This LP is so rare that that’s actually the best photo of it I could find. Recorded live at CBGB in 1984 and later remixed into not sounding like a live album, Sins of Our Fathers is an interesting hybrid of high-speed NYHC (no fucking breakdowns!), a Dead Kennedys/MDC satirical bent and a sort-of proto-Tragedy (the real one) melodic d-beat sound. Damage’s Mike Kirkland would later work the door at CBGB and wind up forming the original lineup of Prong with CB’s soundman Tommy Victor. Awesome shit.

Damage - Sins of Our Fathers LP

File re-upped 9/8/07 for anyone who missed out the first time.

The Internet is amazing: Just last month in our first-ever stoner rock issue we covered the recording of Witchcraft’s new LP The Alchemist. Subscribers are just getting the October issue, and a track from The Alchemist has already made it to the band’s official MySpace page. “Walk Between the Lines” sounds like they put all that vintage equipment to good use, with a nice little acoustic/electric jam in the middle. They’re also going to be in the US for dates over the entire US in October and November, bookended by shows in New York City on October 18th and December 1st.

Hey, that one guy from Rosetta’s name is actually “Weed.” And “Wake,” from Rosetta’s forthcoming second LP Wake/Lift, is as spacey and epic as you’d imagine. You can hear it either on the official Rosetta Myspace along with samples of their previous monsters of metalgaze or by checking out Translation Loss Records’ page. There they’ve also got tracks from Bloodhorse (Witchcraft fans who want something a little louder may want to check this out) and Quips, subjects of my first Decibel review.

I’ve already gushed about Austin’s Brown Jenkins a couple of times, and now they’re justifying the love by making their self-released EP Dagonite available for free download. Five songs of cosmic death/doom, directly inspired by the writings of H.P. Lovecraft - and none of this “Ktulu” bullshit, Brown Jenkins know their stuff. No doubt they approve of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society’s silent “Mythoscope” adaptation of “The Call of Cthulhu.”

Also keeping it unspeakable and unnameable is Iä, a project of Decibel contributor Matthew Widener (Exhumed, Citizen, Cretin) based on Chaosium’s Call of Cthulhu roleplaying game. But more on that in the December issue….

French black metal atonal mind-fuckers Blut Aus Nord have posted the first MP3 from their forthcoming album Odinist on their MySpace page. “The Sound of the Universe” isn’t anything you haven’t heard before (if you’ve heard Blut Aus Nord), but black metal ain’t really a singles format. Anyway, the record features the same line-up from 2006’s MoRT: guitarist Vindsval, drummer W.D. Feld and bassist GhÖst. Odinist is intended as a tribute to Bathory’s deceased founder Quothorn; a new EP called “Lighteater”  (purportedly in the style of 2005’s excellent The Work Which Transforms God) and another record from Vindval’s project The Eye are in the works for 2007/08. Nice! Dudes really oughta take the time to update their website, though…