Brutal Juice- Burpgun

Today, I offer you some measure of aesthetic coherence, at the cost of using the vaguest of vague musical descriptors: rock. The first track is the old-school track: courtesy of Brutal Juice, the clerisy of Texas rock mayhem in the 1990s. Interscope picked them up in the post-Seattle freakfest; they responded lovingly with the issue (I use this in the medical sense) of Mutilation Makes Identification Difficult, the best modern rock album of the 90s, if not the best rock album alone. Alternately terrifying and gleeful, manic and messianic, the Juice concocted a miscible mash out of prog rock, psychpunk, hardcore, and thrash metal. Which earned them their Interscope walking papers. Amazingly, the label hasn’t been devoured by eldritch fiery horrors in the interim. In any event, the Juice broke up, only to reform triumphantly last year, playing a clutch of shows around Dallas (one of which I was lucky enough to attend). The band’s still in grim lockstep; frontman Craig Welch and guitarist Ted Wood still scream in harmony. Welch in particular is a live revelation, doing headstands, mixing it up with pit fighters, and tucking his exposed genitalia between his legs like a three-year-old. Be thrilled. Be terrified. Seek this album out. It’s the real deal.

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Oneida- You’re Drifting

Always had a soft spot for Oneida and their motorik sloppy glory. For
The Wedding, their latest album, the band assembled a gigantic music box out of warped cylinders rotating against sawblades, then translated the results into a pop quantum leap. It’s weird, really, all those violins. And it’s definitely odd to feel woozy from an Oneida melody instead of an Oneida garage groove assault. While I cautiously give this album a thumbs up and hope for a disc of the original music box loops, listen to this sweet little track that feints toward krautrock, veers into sunny psychedelia, and bursts into stringed transcendence.

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Impaled- Preservation of Death

I feel a little suspect yielding up a metal track to the discerning readers of Stylus; while I’m no Slipknot apologist, I have to give it up to the cream of the thrash/death crop plying their trade today. That includes Impaled, who just released the concept album Death After Life. The theme isn’t exactly Dante’s Inferno; the band imagines themselves as wayward medical students who reanimate corpses to gain a perspective on mortality. Yet the band carries the theme to its logical conclusions with humor (Impaled is the kind of band who gives titles to their solos - the final solo, AKA “These Lips Are Sealed,” is the nastiest), impishness, and plenty of howling atmosphere spiraling around squealing riffs. A closer glance at their lyrics show the Impaled boys matching Carcass at the game of Obscure Vocabulary. The baroque closing passage ratchets the track into brooding ambiguity, refusing to play the theme for either straight laughs or abject gore. While I’m still waiting for that fabled MBV-meets-true-metal mix, I’d be crippling myself if I didn’t give stuff like this its due.

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