Crom - The Cocaine Wars 1974-1989
My first exposure to these guys was on the CD version of the first two Cry Now, Cry Later compilations; I initially had bought it for the Meat Shits stuff but I noticed and was impressed (by the idea--the music, not so much) that a band had chosen to cover Hirax.
This full length is a fun album to listen to--not because of the uh, original music, though, which is just grindy and/or doomy filler that helps segue between and flesh out tracks that are otherwise brimming with samples and song sections repurposed from older bands. No, what makes this album enjoyable is that it's full of bits lifted from elsewhere. It's like listening to a goregrind album where the intro samples are more interesting than the music, the Venom live 7" with the brilliant Cronos repartee, and one of the innumerable metal CDs where the band's original music is completely eclipsed by a cover song all at once.
The thing that immediately endeared me to this album was how they throw all sorts of crazy shit together in a wonderfully stream of consciousness sort of way. Of course, the majority of the samples are the requisite Conan the Barbarian soundbites, but Tom Araya, Bruce Dickinson, Ozzy Osbourne (the entire band, in this case), Hawkwind (the Robert Calvert bit from "Sonic Attack"...you know, about bleeding orifices, aching pelvises, etc.), and even the Doobie Brothers appear. Now is a good time to publicly state for the record that I will check out any recording that has 1983-85 Slayer stage banter sampled in it, no matter how terrible it may be.
They also throw in short little tributes to bands of the past. There are a few seconds of "Toxic Trace," "Lethal Tendencies," "Die by the Sword," "Black Funeral," and "Jesus Saves" among everything else, and I suspect there are a couple more I missed (please point these out). Even without these parts, there's a pretty healthy dose of metallic influence here. I see the band commonly classified as powerviolence, which I think is kind of lazy and ignores that influence, but I also realize the complexities of trying to classify a band where a grindy part may be followed by a James Earl Jones sound bite and then a borrowed Kreator riff.
I didn't mention the Hyborian Age much in this post--odd when writing about a band whose theme is centered around Conan--but I'm not terribly qualified to do so. I love the original movie, but I've spent more time in my life reading NWoBHM liner notes than Howard's works.*
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