You're 20 years old and euphoric because you're heading to Turin, the profane mecca for young sound devourers, with half of your meager salary in your pocket, ready to raid vinyls and compact discs.
The mecca in question is the Rock'n'Folk sanctuary, a historic store in Turin where you can find everything related to hardcorepunkmetalthrashblack derivatives of all kinds, etc. I catapult inside and first grab a bunch of CDs before moving on to vinyls. And here's the thing. I choose three vinyls, namely: the first Cradle of Filth album (I can't remember the title), Under a Funeral Moon by Dark Throne, and then there's this strange green record that seems cloaked in putrid algae and muck named Eyehategod - title - In the Name of Suffering.
That decrepit house on the cover, sunk into the thick and suffocating jungle of some unknown swamp, is more sinister than any black metal cover I'd seen so far. Yet that record, thus turned over in my hands, strongly reeks of hardcore, and I came from hardcore. In my blood, red cells raced to the beat of Dead Kennedys, Circle Jerks, and Black Flag, and all the Italian hc of the '80s, and now I wanted something else, some strong and dark emotion stemming from the most remote and dark forces of the millennia and from the forgotten crevices of mankind.
At home, I listened to the entire bounty from that day: among the CDs were Deicide, a Morbid Angel bootleg, Pure Holocaust by Immortal, and De Mysteriis.. by MayheM, and then I moved on to the vinyls. An orgy of death black metal malevolence at the highest levels, a veritable tribute to the Gods of Chaos... Not to mention the last record of the slaughter, Under the Funeral Moon by Dark Throne, a black and cold journey into a sinister, rotten, and malignant dimension, a perfect pagan tribute to the Dark Lord paid with blood.
But the Eyehategod record remained there on the desk. I didn't feel like listening to it, but then curiosity got the better of me. I knew it was something extremely different. For a moment, I was struck by tremendous despair: << what if it's some crappy grunge band?>> I said to myself. In those years, you could even find grunge in the pharmacy... I put on the vinyl and prepared to listen... what is offered to you from the very first moments is an overflowing bass line overshadowed by lacerating feedback that introduces the actual piece, "Depress", which starts slow and ragged, launches into a rusty hardcore of a few seconds, and then returns to its crumbling initial chords.
Over all this rises (rises????) the gullet (gullet???) of Mike Williams, a desperate and snarling howl, torn, that of a man in the throes of delirium tremens. Eyehategod are not like Deicide, MayheM, or Dark Throne; their music is neither super fast nor evokes sinister demonic atmospheres or arcane pagan presences. Eyehategod are present, damnably, terrifyingly, heavily present. Every one of their one-ton riffs is saturated with toxic waste and used syringes, Mike's voice is marred by the shards of bottles broken in brawls, the drums mark the time of our neuroses' collapse, the ever-present feedback are the nightmares tormenting our sleep, which without excellent doses of hypnotics and anxiolytics we could not ease.
The landscape they paint is the everyday, both metropolitan and provincial, the oil stains on the dirty snow, the factory chimneys always smoking, the everyday squalor perpetuated since time immemorial, and the cold, again the cold, but this is the cold in the mind and heart of present men, the cold and the desert. Clearly, faced with a record like this, all the stuff by Fenriz, Nocturno Culto, Zephyrous, and their face-painting companions seemed like a Snow White fairy tale, and indeed I put the record away and listened to it only a few more times, because I wanted to feel grim and evil and not depressed and disturbed. Still, it was a hardcore record, and as someone with hc in their blood, I rediscovered EHG greatly (even though I still feel that way about their music, it's their greatness) and enjoy them now more than ever at 37, with a world saturated with every kind of scum, with the infected syringes used for transfusions in hospitals, and with the Lord of Evil Grim&misanthropic und NSDAP black metal engaged on the musical purge front.
I love you all so much, listen to Eyehategod, and you will love me too. Don't eat vegetables; they also have the right to live.
Tracklist Lyrics and Samples
08 Left to Starve (03:09)
I scar my body
Like a good boy
It takes practice at self abuse
Ceiling turns to paper dolls
Caught with circles under your eyes
I help to blind you
I help to see the truth
Worried
Hold me down
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By Bartleboom
"The sound of the album ended up being raw and entirely uncompromising. Even ahead of its time, for its primordial aggression."
"Mike Williams, evangelist of a bad novella, ambassador of a universal message of self-harm, marginalization, poverty, synthetic trips gone wrong..."