#SHUFFLEBRAG #HEAVYSUNDAY

LINK WRAY "All Cried Out" Holy sweet mother of god, why didn't any of you tell me about this song. Only The Band themselves can hold a candle to it, but here comes Link Wray in 1973 singing like an uncanny late-period Helm/Manuel hybrid, on a country weeper so beautiful and haunted and big that you can't even see the other side.

SUN CITY GIRLS "Halcyon Days of Symmetry" Not on YouTube! Two minutes and 24 seconds from 1987, the lead-off song on their first 7" EP. (They had released 3 LPs already.) A raw blast of punk improvisation, a hot shot of power trio fury in the service of pure non-verbal post-tongue Babel worship. On electric guitar and bass, the Bishop brothers Rick and Alan respectively and unitedly achieve a density mixed with velocity that is only found in hardcore punk, speed metal, industrial, and noise; they place it directly in none of those (although I honestly still think of them primarily as a hardcore band, one of the most expansive and long-lived hardcore bands ever). You might hate their utter reckless improvisational abandon, but in true punk fashion it's over in 2 minutes, suddenly as absent as it was present. (They have some releases where they do it for 25 minutes instead; even some of their biggest fans avoid those.)

BASTARDS "Turvallista Huomista" Mindblowing Finnish hardcore from 1982.

AARON NEVILLE "Hercules" Funky Allen Touissant production from 1973.

ROYAL TRUX "Morphic Resident" Might be a Top 5 Trux Track™. And hell no I'm not messing up this page by putting the album cover on here :-)

MATT VALENTINE "Free Again"

BOBBY WILLIAMS "Tarzan"

JAY-Z FEAT. FOXY BROWN "Ain't No Playa"

13TH FLOOR ELEVATORS "Livin' On" Kinda underwritten song but lyrics contain some heady nugs... "I may drop in and plant smokestacks" haunts me the most, and of course gotta love "I hear you talkin' / You're only poppin' spit."

PEKKA AIRAKSINEN "Fos 2" Crazy electronic track from Finland. Bad trip noise kinda like Can's "Aumgn" but with more rhythm, from a 1972 solo LP by a member of The Sperm.

SIX ORGANS OF ADMITTANCE "Hollow Light, Severed Sun" The debut LP was great, but it was his 2nd album, a CD-only release on Holy Mountain called Dust & Chimes, that really scared the shit out of me back in the late 90s glory daze. Sure the great post-Takoma acoustic guitar instrumentals were there, but the songs with vocals, like this one, are particularly intense. Holy Mountain released it on vinyl for the first time ever this year; need to grip.

BOLA SETE "The Lonely Gaucho"

BOB DYLAN & THE BAND "Yea! Heavy and a Bottle of Bread (take 1)"

BIG STAR "Mod Lang (Live on WLIR)"

OMIT "Lander" One of NZ's heaviest.

TWINSISTERMOON "Conjuring" Only recently discovered how goddamn good this band (solo proect?) is/was. Natural Snow Buildings great too. Progressive French Folk Rock lives!

ELASTIK BAND "Spazz" I kinda don't like this song. More 'proto new wave' than proto-punk.

ANTHONY BRAXTON/MILFORD GRAVES/WILLIAM PARKER "Third Meeting" Dream team delivers.

DAN MELCHIOR UND DAS MENACE "Norman Roake" This song is from Christmas for Crows, a really good LP that put Mr. Melchior on my radar when it came out back in 2008. Doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but some other songs from the album are, like "In A Daze." You can buy secondhand copies real cheap still -- gotta grab those 2000s gems while they're still being overlooked, taken for granted, etc.

INSTANT AGONY "Think Of England" More MBW (mindblowing) hardcore from 1982.

THE AGGROVATORS "Dub On My Pillow"

APHEX TWIN "dsb"

E.C.P. "Generate" I checked out this song on YouTube after reading somebody named DJ Toecutter raving about it, in an interview in this crazy foldover newsprint zine ("Fuck Your Money!! Do Not Buy! This is Free") that the Digital Hardcore label published sometime in the 90s (of course).

TOPMOST "The End" More weird-bee Finnish garage experimentation... could the Topmost have been Finland's Red Crayola?

BRIMSTONE HOWL "Child Of Perdition" Lincoln, Nebraska band, written about in Blastitude (when they were called something else) by Charles Lieurance over ten goddamn years ago. Look for Charles's book In Search of Pagan Hollywood, coming soon on Feral House.

DEAD MOON "Kicked Out, Kicked In" Speaking of ten, and twenty, and thirty (approximately when this song was recorded), and forty goddamn years ago...

DELMA LACHNEY & BLIND UNCLE GASPARD "La Danseuse" ...and fifty, and sixty, and seventy, and eighty, and ninety (approximately when this song was recorded) (!) goddamn years ago...

RITALIN O.D. Bellwood, Illinois's finest.

IT'S SATURDAY NIGHT, BLAST THIS NOW:

Superb video of a party thrown by Volcano Sound System in Kingston, Jamaica, in the year 1984. Volcano was also a successful label, the business venture of one Henry "Junjo" Lawes, but he was probably making just as much money from the packed sound system dances where tons of Kingstonians turned out to hear Yellowman and Josey Wales, Jamaica's version of rock stars. The camera here is in the Skateland DJ booth, right there with the mic controllers; attendees crowd around to watch the masters of ceremony ply their trade; one can imagine hundreds, maybe even a couple thousand more attendees beyond them, all hearing the rhythms and vocals loud and clear over the massive speakers, dancing, talking, eating, drinking, partying down. Josey Wales starts the show with utter smoothness, and Lee Van Cliff follows him as the second half of a textbook one-two punch. Then, a rather hilarious guy with a deep froggy voice takes the mic from Van Cliff and keeps saying "MY NEW NAME IS.... BRBRBBRBRBRRBBR RIBBIT-MAN!!!" I think it's Papa Toyan, but I barely know what the hell is going on at all. I do know how crucial the selection is at the 7:20 mark when "100 Weight of Collie Weed" by Carlton Livingston comes booming over the speakers. Gotta be one of the smoothest and baddest drug smuggling songs of all time. tough like a Melville/Delon crime film, and now Josey Wales is voicing over Livingston's vocal so that the titular weed isn't "coming from St. Anne's" but in fact "COMING TO SKATELAND!" where the dance is being held. The Livingston tune gives way into its own instrumental dub version, and the Outlaw Josey just plain goes off... it's his show all the way, for this clip anyway, with Yellowman really just playing backup. After "Collie Weed" a guy I've never heard of named Louis Lepke takes a turn; he looks cool, and his first verse really rips, maybe in fact too much, too soon, as he seems to get flustered and quickly stops, saying something like "I'm kinda frightened/not in a wonderful condition/so I get nervous when I heard an explosion," referring to the gunshot sound effects someone else in the DJ booth is going nuts with. Josey Wales takes back the mic and I could swear critiques Lepke's performance with a quick "I would rehearse these things or not/that was secretly hot," which is really goddamn accurate.

Anyway, check the perennial Who Cork The Dance for a typically vast page on the Volcano Sound System, including a whole bunch of photos, flier reproductions, and non-dead links to massive sound files of dance after dance.

Needless to say there's lots more where this came from (YouTube), like an hour of Legendary Wha Dat Sound in 1985 (below), but first here's Part 2 of this Volcano jammy in which the Outlaw Josey Wales just keeps rollin', even rockin' a little "Leavin' On A Jet Plane." And it don't stop: