Back in November of 2007, the North West UK was treated to two festivals on the same weekend – ‘Damnation’ and ‘Gekfest’. While both catered to a metal audience, ‘Gekfest’ was unarguably the more underground, more extreme festival, appealing to a more niche audience than the fairly mainstream Damnation. In-line with the extreme nature of Gekfest, the flier’s slogan stated ‘No frills, no faggotry’, an obvious jab at the watered-down scenecore / pussy bands which plague the modern live metal scene, and nothing more than that.

Deathmike took the opportunity to report Gekfest to Greater Manchester Police as a ‘hate crime’, as a result of the festival’s slogan. This was done as a result of a personal vendetta between Damnation organisers (whom Deathmike is closely affiliated with) and Paul, the organiser of Gekfest, and not as a result of any valiant crusade against homophobia, which is how the meddling parties are now trying to paint the picture.

As a result of these (and similar) actions by Deathmike and his Damnation cohorts, Negura Bunget, the Gekfest headliner, were told that they were not allowed to play, making Manchester the only city skipped on their tour and ensuring that lots of Negura fans (myself included) didn’t get to see one of their favourite bands.

I know full well that Deathmike did not report the gig because of a crusade against intolerance. He did it for shits and giggles, to stir up drama, and to get his own back at Paul, who he felt had insulted Damnation by (quite rightly) pointing out that it is the more commercial of the two events.

So, yeah. Deathmike’s removed from the authors and won’t be contributing to Metal Jerks any more. I’ll leave his reviews up because I’m never a fan of destroying creative works, even when made by vindictive people with disagreeable opinions.

Fuck you, Deathmike.

Jaldaboath at Myspace

When I heard that Jaldaboath (real name James Fogarty) was recording a solo EP, I was anxious to hear the results. He was a founding member of one of my favorite metal bands, The Meads of Asphodel. However, when I actually got around to hearing this EP, it turned out to be a terrible pile of hoary “medieval” cliches.

Things actually start off fairly well, with a brief intro track leading into “Bring Me the Head of Metatron.” Folk metal has never been one of my favorite subgenres, but this opening track isn’t bad at all. However, things take a turn for the worse for the next three tracks, which use cheesy synthesized “medieval” instruments and have terrible lyrics that not even a Monty Python sketch would touch.  The final track, “Da Vinci’s Code,” isn’t quite as bad as what preceded it, but it’s too late to save the EP. What I loved about the Meads was that they were always going off in different directions; not all of their experiments worked, but they were always interesting. None of that experimentation is in evidence here; it’s just cliche after cliche after cliche.

Now, I don’t hate silliness in metal. I love many bands I find to be incredibly silly; I find the anti-Christian sentiments of many bands to be hilarious, and the macho posturing of bands like Manowar sends me into conniptions. But Hark the Herald is just played too straight for me to get any laughs out of it.  If it’s meant seriously, it’s terrible. If it’s meant as a joke, it’s not funny. This is one of the most disappointing releases of 2008 in my opinion.

Made in Japan is the third release from the Flower Travellin’ Band, and it’s just not as interesting as their first two efforts. Anywhere had some awesome cover songs, and Satori was wonderfully psychedelic, but the songwriting on here isn’t up to par with their previous release. There just isn’t anything on this release that seems especially groundbreaking for 1972. The songs are relatively short, so they don’t have the impressive lengthy grooves of those on Satori. The few highlights include the Pink Floyd-esque opening to “Hiroshima” and the wonderfully happy “Heaven and Hell.” This one’s only for completists.

The Flower Travellin’ Band released one more album called Make Up before they disbanded, but I couldn’t track down a copy, so I won’t be reviewing it.

Satori is the Flower Travellin’ Band’s most famous effort. The tracks are all named “Satori” parts I through V, but they really don’t sound that similar at all. Part I starts off with a tone reminiscent of the Emergency Broadcast System, and then vocalist Akira Yamanaka lets loose with a piercing scream. It’s amazing how heavy this stuff is for 1971. Part II is my favorite track on the album. The guitar melody is simply hypnotic and Eastern-sounding, the drums have a good mix of trippy cymbals and bass drum pounding, and there’s some great tambourine in the mix. Part III is an instrumental that takes a little while to get started, with some semi-ambient noise for the first 90 seconds, but it’s awesome once it does. The guitar work on this track is awesome; it’s fairly slow, but never plodding, but gets fast right towards the end. The fourth part is a little repetitive for the first third of its eleven minutes, but settles into an awesome, laid-back bluesy section with a harmonica that lasts until the final two minutes, when the song reverts to the first part again. The final track, Part V, has some awesome chanting from Yamanaka and some nice keyboard work, as well.

This is a great album, and I recommend it to anyone who loves Black Sabbath or other early metal bands.

Flower Travellin’ Band at Myspace

The Flower Travellin’ Band was one of the first bands that was heavily influenced by Black Sabbath, and who helped established the earliest form of doom metal. Despite that fact, they’re not well known today, which is a shame, because they’re quite good. They were originally a cover band with a female vocalist called the Flowers, but they retooled themselves as the Travellin’ Band after she left. They broke up in 1973, but reunited recently and recorded an album, “We Are Here,” which was released just last month in Japan. I have decided to celebrate this by reviewing their first three albums.

Aside from the minute-long harmonica opener “Anywhere,” all the songs on the first proper Flower Travellin’ Band release are covers. Things start off with a lengthy cover of Muddy Waters’ Louisiana Blues. While the musicianship on display is fine, at nearly sixteen minutes, the jamming goes on too long for its own good. Next up is a cover of Black Sabbath’s self-titled song from their self-titled debut. It lacks the atmospheric lightning, rain and church bells that were at the beginning, but it’s still pretty good; I especially liked vocalist Akira Yamanaka’s delivery of the “OH GOD NO!!!” line, although his pronunciation of the English lyrics is about as poor as you’d expect (as well as in all the other songs). This is followed by a rendition of the traditional song “House of the Rising Sun”; this has an intro that goes on for too long, and the sparse arrangment with just an acoustic guitar and drums makes the song’s eight minutes seem even longer. I felt this was the worst song on the album. The album closes with King Crimson’s “21st Century Schizoid Man.” I have to say I liked the original version better with its screeching saxophone, but the Travellin’ Band’s cover is still quite good.

It was clear that the Flower Travellin’ Band had talent, but they hadn’t quite found their niche yet. Their artistic breakthrough wouldn’t come until their follow-up, Satori, which consisted entirely of original compositions. This album is still a decent effort, though, and it’s historically important because it contains what must be some of the first Black Sabbath and King Crimson covers ever recorded.

First, the metal elements are pretty superficial. The real emphasis of this album is the lyrics, and man, are they ever a doozy. They’re some of the most offensive stuff I’ve ever heard. The subject matter is similar to early Cannibal Corpse; if Chris Barnes had become a rapper instead of a death metal singer, he might have lyrics like these. (I would go into more detail, but my mom reads my reviews here so I won’t.) It’s like they were trying to go out of the way to cover all the bases of offensiveness; in addition to the typical lyrics about rape and murder, the occasionally throw in a few anti-Christian lyrics. The rhyming is pretty insipid; a typical example is “surgeon” and “virgin”. Profanity is way over used; I counted 40 F-bombs in the second song, which is six and a half minutes long. There are also some samples from “true crime” shows, including a truly sickening one from a child murderer that I had to skip over. They also lifted the opening from Black Sabbath’s debut album for the beginning of the last track, something any fan of real metal would recognize, but which would go over the heads of nu-metal fans.

I’m not entirely sure why I reviewed this album. As mentioned above, there’s barely any metal in it even for a nu-metal album, I hate rap so I can’t really judge it by that genre’s standards, and it’s so obscure that no one’s likely to find it anywhere. I still kind of enjoy it despite its lyrics, but I’m definitely laughing at these guys instead of with them.

Jig-Ai at MySpace

First things first, I must say how great the Czech Republic is for metal. You have incredible bands like !T.O.O.H.!, Duobetic Homunkulus, Mincing Fury And Guttural Clamour Of Queer Decay, Negligent Collateral Collapse, Eardelete, and Ahumado Granujo who really know what they’re doing in the elements of death metal, grindcore and goregrind. Respectively, the group that I’m talking about today has two guys coming from the last three bands I just mentioned, and the third coming from a band I’ve never heard of, so those three are the crazy bastards that form Jig-Ai, who goes underneath my microscope of brutality at the moment.

For those of you who are aware of when this album dropped out of the sky, I’m sure you’re wondering why I’m reviewing it now rather than two years ago. The main reason is because I’m sure most people just skimmed over this album as the usual goregrind fanfare with a Japanese and hentai*/guro** twist. Well morons, you’re wrong.

In the opening paragraph I already said these fellows are from the Czech Republic, but I neglected to tell you about how insane Czech Republic goregrind is. Ahumado Granujo alone turned me on to what I consider the only genre where experimentation is acceptable. Jig-Ai‘s bass player, Burak, hails from Ahumado Granujo, and one of the most notable things about that band is their utterly bizarre sound effects and electronica/techno remixes (i.e. their cover of “King Anus III”, originally by Cock And Ball Torture, and complete overhaul of Pete Sandoval’s drum track off of Morbid Angel‘s “Heretic”).

The reason I mention them in the first place is because you can definitely hear the sound effect influence from Ahumado Granujo, and I’m almost certain that Burak was the creator of all those glorious noises. Now, the main difference between the two bands with Burak is that Ahumado Graunjo‘s noises were much more quarky and fun, all while Jig-Ai‘s are actually strikingly cryptic and haunting. They range from random anime characters yelling incoherently (“VogelGrippe-N”) to bizarre noises (“Final C(u)nt” ,”Japanese Gut Cake” and “Injectator Kruto”), and they just add to the carnage that is already invading your ears.

As much as I’d like to compare all of these riffs and song structures to those of Impetigo, Gut, Cliteater, and Dead Infection, I just can’t. There’s just something about Jig-Ai that makes them the ultimate goregrind band in my mind, and I think it’s all of the different elements they use in their music. I’ve already mentioned the weird sampling, but there’s also the varying degrees between Mozek’s pitch-shifted vocals. He never sticks to just the usual low and guttural voice, but also changes it up to make him sound like a swarm of locusts, or even say my mother-in-law belching at dinner in a higher tone. I would honestly give somebody $20 U.S. (***NOT A REAL OFFER!!!***) if they didn’t start tapping their fingers or feet while listening to the beginning of “Sadomasochistic Practices Manual” or “HN-Islam“, or if they didn’t even laugh at Jig-Ai‘s wonderful take on the Brujeria classic, “La Ley de Plomo“.

Jig-Ai have come into a world where goregrind can get so repetitive and stale and turned the guidelines inside out and wore them as a hat. They really have put themselves on the goregrind pedestal because of their originality, groove, and let’s face it, their song titles are pretty damn funny (who the hell thinks up “Suffocated Between Gigantic Utters” or “Extruding Testicles Through Garlic Press”?). “Jig-Ai” is definitely for somebody who wants something extra with their gore, and Jig-Ai have an all-you-can-eat buffet of it.

*Hentai: Anime cartoon characters having intercourse. There may or may not be a shortage of tentacles depending on the film.

**Guro: Hentai cartoons that involve lots of dismemberment, vore, sadism, and other wonderfully violent acts. I hope you get a boner from it.