It begins...

In past years, I’ve made some goofy new years’ resolutions. I’ve tried giving up caffeine, alcohol and other various things. I’ve sworn up and down that I’d hit the gym with scheduled regularity, that I would catch up on my stack of books to read or not miss a single update here on ConfuseReviews. Every perceived shortcoming I’ve had the gumption to attack after a few drinks on New Years’ Eve, every bad habit I’ve sworn off, all of them have failed, but I like to think I’m still accomplishing something through my botched attempts.

I’d LIKE to think that, and anyone who wants to point out otherwise can go fuck themselves. I’m building… uh… character. Yeah.

Anyway, this year my new years’ resolution is a little less about my shortcomings and a little more about the website’s. We’ve always had a shortage of music articles on CR for various reasons. Partially it’s because we’re all spoiled by the information age and the idea of “new music” isn’t all that special to us anymore, which is a sad admission. Moreso it’s because writing about music is hard to make funny; “yeah, this album sure sucked” can only be phrased so many ways, and praise is something we’re just not that good at here. Also playing a part is that Syd’s the only full-blown audiophile amongst us, with Reid being the only guy I know who regularly reads books anymore, me with my film background and Zach born with an NES controller already in his hands. They are mighty powers to be sure, but none of them make for a lot of album reviews.

Mostly, though, the lack of music articles is because we’re lazy and it’s easier to write about ridiculous news snippets and what it would be like if Dr. Doom fought Jimminy Cricket. The “miscellanea” section grows and the poor music section stays underfed. Well no more.

For the year of 2010, I have made a resolution to review at least one album a week. Will they all be hilarious? Probably not. Will they all make sense? God no. But I will try to at least be fair and interesting, with a joke here or there even when reviewing… shudder… stuff I actually like. The prospect is chilling, I know, but if I had to review 52 shitty albums I’d run out of stuff to say about mid-April. It’s gonna be a looooong year.

Of course, no need to start with that. We can start with an album I hate thoroughly and unquestionably. An album from a band like SCROTUM GRINDER.

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In 1997, a period of turmoil had settled into the world of hardcore punk music. Because the genre required little to no talent to perform, there was a brief point in May of that year where every American citizen was a member in at least three hardcore punk bands, operating out of suburban garages and parents’ basements like children’s lemonade stands but with more pointless screaming. This oversaturation of the market stood to wipe out a proud American tradition of not knowing how to play guitar or sing, as the only people who might be interested in going to see really shitty screamy-punk bands were too busy fronting their own individual projects. Fans of music rejoiced, but the hardcore punk scene lived in constant fear (especially members of Konstant Feer, an Orlando area band consisting of two twelve-year-old brothers and a keyboardist in her late fifties).

A notable predecessor, Assuck's "Misery Index" is equally impossible to find due to lack of interest.

To combat the crisis, members of “prominent” hardcore punk bands Hankshaw, Failure Face, Watermark 6000, In/Humanity and of course the classically trained Grindcore virtuoso quartet Assück sent delegates to Tampa, epicenter of the wannabe-raver Florida pre-teen community. Their mission: to negotiate across-the-board restrictions to hardcore punk band creation rates that could serve the community’s preservation without curtailing the creative freedoms so central to hardpunk, grindcore, punkcore, grindpunk, coregrind, breaksmash, killhate, hatesmash, smashsmash and other related musical fields.

Instead, the delegates jimmied open one of their parents’ liquor cabinets, talked for six hours about how much the government was bullshit, and formed the supergroup SCROTUM GRINDER. History in the making.

SCROTUM GRINDER quickly made a name for themselves by being precisely as loud, as simplistic and as intelligent as every other band in their genre formed by mopey children who knew two guitar chords. In 1999 they performed an eighteen hour long (this is absolutely true) cover of Judas Priest…’s cover of Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust at a show in Atlanta Georgia.  Once the lead singer was revived in the last hour of the performance (this is also completely true), the audience burst into thunderous applause, most likely because by this point the tiny dive-bar venue had closed and reopened to a decidedly less entertained morning-drinker crowd. Thus it was to live the life… of SCROTUMGRINDER.

Ah, there must be two copies, because mine didn't have the Zoobooks business on the side there.

As is often the case with performance-oriented genres like punk, thrash, experimental jazz and competitive cup-stacking, SCROTUMGRINDER only released a few albums. Their first self-titled 7″ record hit the market in 1997, rebelliously six years after the last financial viability of vinyl had dried up. This was followed by a “split” album shared with fellow obscure “band”  Combat Wounded Veteran in 1999. Consistently dumfounded by the digital music scene, SCROTUM GRINDER finally released their very own CD, The Greatest Sonic Abomination Ever, in 2001, then promptly broke up. The album sold, by best estimates, one copy, which was quickly sold to a used music store in Denver for a dollar, where I found it. A proud end, considering the genre.

The Greatest Sonic Abomination Ever is, thusly, the best sample of SCROTUM GRINDER’s work available to the public now, although a live album was released in 2002 to nobody, nowhere. A careful analysis of the record suggests its place as a masterwork, a perfect sampling of the band’s styles and sensibilities. Perfectly capturing the gritty live sound of a band playing one song for 19 hours straight, the album is fittingly 20-ish minutes long despite being 19 tracks (I’m not even close to kidding about this), some of which are less than twenty seconds long and consist entirely of feedback and screeching. The twelve-second track “Blood and Tongue” consists of one guitar lick, screaming, then a few seconds of silence and a single voice asking them to reiterate what they just said, while the longer album-topper, “Ending” appears to be all the other tracks of the album played over each other for 43 seconds before ending abruptly as though the recording device simply shut off. Bassist Stan Kosiba’s brilliant kazoo work (you think I’m joking here, but I’m really not) is most prevalent on the 36 second track “Geld”… I’m assuming. It’s hard to pick out a kazoo from music composed within the leitmotif of two strings of a guitar plucked repeatedly without any fingers on the neck and then amplified well beyond the signal-to-noise point.

Although most tracks on The Greatest Sonic Abomination Ever are between ten and 80 seconds long, the notable exception is the album’s thrilling crescendo “Counter Hegemonimania”, a unique song in that it features discernible drums which seem to have been played by a toddler a’la pots and pans taken out of the cupboard and hit with a wooden spoon. At three minutes twenty eight seconds it is easily the most epic track on the album, and showcases lead singer Milton Chapman’s voice beautifully. Chapman’s ability to scream in monotone for three minutes straight is impressive, as by this point in the album one might think that the short track lengths are a necessity so that he can take breaks for hot tea or perhaps a cough drop. Not so, proclaims Counter Hegemonimania, as it is easily the only track on the album that takes longer to play than to read its title.

Ah, yes, the brilliant naming conventions of SCROTUM GRINDER. With titles like “The Function and Malfunction of Lab Experiment No. 768″, “Irritable Bowel Disorder: Project Reagan” and of course “Recipe for Token Sing-Along Polemic Complete With Expletives Aimed At Positions Of Power”, The Greatest Sonic Abomination Ever has pound for pound equal amounts of literature and music, quite literally. Perhaps the humor in ascribing a paragraph-length  title to a song the length of a public domain sound effect file is lost after nine or ten usages, but this should not dissuade one from laughing at SCROTUM GRINDER. Oh no. Not a bit.

In the end, SCROTUM GRINDER’s The Greatest Sonic Abomination Ever is slightly less than a half hour of flat screaming, guitar failure and clumsy angst aimed at nobody in particular. It’s a subtle album… in that you can have it playing and not notice it, if you happen to live somewhere where street-maintenance is frequent enough that you’ve become deaf to it by now. Perhaps we’ll never know what behind-the-scenes turmoil ended the wild ride of SCROTUM GRINDER, but we do know one thing for sure. As long as teenagers think they can play the guitar or sing despite not really being able to, there will still be new SCROTUM GRINDER material. Sure, the name may change, but the music sounds the same. Deep.