Fuck me, there is a LOT of music out in the world.
Did you know that there are people out there who are more or less serious all the time? Maybe it’s just a stoic face they put on, or maybe something has truly curdled inside them, but my word, it is a draaaaag. The world out there? It’s heavy, folks. Things are, you might charitably say, shitty and fucked-up and also bad. But music? I like it! Well, not the shitty and fucked-up and also bad stuff. But the good stuff! The stuff that tingles your jingle.
Although I am often constitutionally allergic to having a point in this recurring feature, maybe my point with French Yam Fudge and Fuck You Fridays can be that if you want to walk around this earth with a goddamn straight face be my gosh-darn guest but that is not what I signed up for. I should not like to march into T.S. “Holy Shit Was This Guy Serious Except He Also Wrote The Fucking Poems That Got Turned Into Cats? Are You Serious?” Eliot’s vision of death’s dream kingdom wearing a nametag that says, “Hi, I decided in this life I didn’t want to laugh very much.” So… music and jokes? Let’s get to it.
Fuck you, why not go listen to some of THIS music?
Final Dose – Under The Eternal Shadow
If you had to describe Final Dose’s Under the Eternal Shadow in one word, that word would almost certainly NOT be “subtle.” This London band’s second album is beautiful in exactly the same way that sharks are birds: not at all. Before you Mako big fuss about that misdirect, I will tell you that Final Dose plays grimy, luxuriantly punky black metal. You know the drill: d-beats, savagely simplistic riffs, and some fella hollering like he’s got a bee up the pee-hole. Fuck you, yes, these are good things.
Although I do not necessarily trust a band called Final Dose that makes more than one album, I hope that you will trust me to Nurse you back to health next time a Hammer hits your Head. It’ll be a Great White lark.
Drain Of Impurity – Hallucinations From Beyond
FYF alumnus Drain of Impurity is back with an experimental digression. Let’s check in to see what wisdom we dropped about this Turkish act last time: “If…to… Do…Thanksgiving…you…screamed…FUCK YOU.” Huh. So insightful. In any case, on Hallucinations from Beyond, Drainman Batu Çetin offers up eight tracks of slightly industrial-tinged drum & bass backed by distorted guitar squiggles and sewer grunts.
The death metal purist in you might recoil, but how often have you listened to a brutal death metal band that sounds, more or less, like an air conditioner with a tummy ache? Point being, when you push sounds to a certain extreme, they eventually condense around pure, baseline poles of rhythm and texture. Drain of Impurity’s trick here is to swap Çetin’s typical Brutal Slamming Turk for a new, Mechanical Turk. (Fuck you, fight me, Bezos.)
Spume – Spider Birth Reingurgitation
First up: how cheerful and friendly is that Spume logo? I would say it’s almost the inverse of Spume’s music, except this music is so hilariously, beautifully stupid that it does not understand what “inverse” means. Probably ol’ Spume-y is scratching the noggin over yonder in Portland trying to figure out how to add some “inchoruses” to these tunes. Hello and fuck yoouuuuuuu!
If the band name, album name, song titles, and … “fat Jesus having a pretty tough day and wishing he never pulled that Lazarus move”(?) cover art didn’t tip Spume’s hat, what we’re looking at here is a glistening gob of solo slamming goregrind depravity. The snare pops like a soda in the American Midwest. The blasts, they make with the gravity. The guitars scratch and chunk and bellyflop all over the place. Is it entirely possible that the vocals are just the sound of Winston Churchill’s “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds” speech fed through a pitch shifter and a backhoe? Friend, I demand that it be so.
Psudoku – Psudoktrination
There was a famous anti-drug use commercial that played incessantly in the U.S. during the ‘80s. Guy picks up egg: “This is your brain.” Guy points at frying pan: “This is drugs.” Guy cracks egg in pan: “This is your brain on drugs. Any questions?” Friend, I have questions. How many takes did they need for that smarmy shit to crack my brain with one hand? Will the drugs make my brain over-easy or over-medium? Was somebody just really hungry and hungover when they pitched this campaign?
Please stop distracting me, because I am here of the Psudoku, by the Psudoku, for the Psudoku. It’s just one guy from Norway, I guess? But it sounds like if you took Melt-Banana and tossed it in a wood chipper with a Rottweiler. No, of course it doesn’t. It is twisty sproingy prickly space-obsessed jazz-grind, though. These tunes are so tippy-tappy brittle precise that they make the word ‘staccato’ quiver with a sense of inadequacy. If you want your music to swing, get your ass in a time machine to Harlem and do the Lindy Hop. Psudoku is punishingly aggrieved music for particularly sexless robots: stiff, tightly wound, violently unpredictable.
Psudoktrination is the kind of music that sounds like the band landed a highly sought-after female deer named Susan to come into the studio and tap-dance on the effects pedals. It was a real Sue Doe Coup. Fuck you, I’ll see myself out.
Coffin Mulch x Mick Harris – In Dub
It’s two songs, it’s eleven minutes, it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s… slow, diseased death-dub. If you’ve heard any of Mick Harris’s work under the dark electronic moniker Scorn, you’ll be mostly on the right track. A smarter person than me could probably tell you if these two songs are remixes of particular tracks from the excellent Scottish death metal band Coffin Mulch or if they feature newly recorded metal-y and grumbly voice bits, but when you have these corrosive beats and absurdly rubbery waves of guitar distortion pouring into your ears like Moses drowning the pursuing Egyptians, it’s hard to imagine you’ll care about such details.
“Cease to Exist,” in particular, is regular nightmare fuel, with its skittering, insectoid snares and a nearly white-noise level of distortion overload. It’s almost, if you ask me, a bit coffin much – I notice with the volume up loud enough that my Harris all standing on end. Fuck you AND me on this one, but I guess if you read the title backwards and drop-kicked it backwards into 1975, Harris and Thee Mulchers could be the Knights Who Say Bud Ni.
Rotted Tower – Blessed Ruin
With Rotted Tower’s debut recording, the 13-minute EP Blessed Ruin, we welcome back yet another FYF (c)alum(ny) in Ryan Lipynsky (last seen in these hallowed halls with Altered States). Here he is joined by Hudson Barth from Reeking Aura for a delectably greasy run through four bruising death metal chunkers. The guitar tone is a crushing bulldozer of a thing, while Barth’s drums slap the tympanic membrane with a wet snap. “Lore of the Cursed” is not, as far as I can tell, about Data’s evil brother, but fuck you anyway because it IS about kicking ass with a defiantly limited palette of crushing riffs, dyspeptic vocals, and crumbling masonry drumming.
At this point, though, Lipynsky has been in so many different bands that I’m a little worried he thinks they’re like a single-use disposable cup. Brother, we’ve got to get you right with recycling! It’s all about that Blessed trifecta of ru-use, ru-duce, Ru-in.
Urisk – Shrivelling Lights
If you thought this was the kind of no-account doofus operation that might start a blurb about this German band’s debut with a crack about how Urisk, Irisk, Weallrisk for Icerisk, then you are in the right place but we should probably both feel badly. Urisk is an atmospheric black metal duo, and on Shrivelling Lights, they slather up an almost sludge-like production that still really gets cooking. Like, if you imagined the visual aesthetic of Kubrick’s 2001 as an album production style (please don’t do this), Urisk presents you with the opposite. Mein Gott, es ist voller schrumpfender Sterne.
Fuck you, of course there are songs here. What did you think this was, insongnia? Urisk’s vocalist Marleen Bügener has a great blackened rasp, but also brings in a gothic, almost operatic clean angle to her singing from time to time. On “Grip of Fog,” she even wails and yips out a transition to a high-cycling post-black tremolo gem from Benedikt Brixius’s guitar while the rest of the song gestures towards a sort of blackened crust in the vein of Agrimonia. This is very good music and I’m sorry you had to learn about it like this. See how disappointed that little devil guy on the cover is? I feel ya, buddy, but hang in there!
Falsus Evangelium – Veneficus, Barratry, Et Magnum Peccatum
If you had “16-minute EP from Indonesian solo band that plays like Ved Buens Ende decided to rip harder into second-wave blastiness” on your 2025 bingo card, what the fuck kind of nursing home do you live at, gramps? Falsus Evangelium really nails the sort of bleary, woozy attitude of VBE with guitar bends, frequent shifts in mood and tone, and some deliciously inventive drumming. Friend, I would love to go on, but fuck you, I enjoy this little cutie so much I can’t think of any more jokes. Even if you get similarly jazzed on it, though, please don’t go and beat anybody up because you might be charged with Barratry.
BYONoisegenerator – Subnormal Dives
I’ve had to scour the internet far and wide to crack the code of this Russian band’s enigmatic name, but I finally figured out that it’s an acronym! BYONoisegenerator stands for Boy, Your Only New Other Interest Seems Exceptionally… Gross? Every Nearby Educator Recommends Alcoholism Treatment Or Retirement. Fuck you, acronyms are HARD (Hilarious And Really ‘Dorable).
More to the point, though, the five members of this BYONoisegeneration have taken their cues from the spastic noise/jazz/grind of John Zorn’s Naked City and Painkiller projects, along with a healthy dose of the extra skronky sasscore of something like The Locust or Cephalic Carnage at their least presentable. Sure, there are recognizable instruments like saxophone and guitar and drums, but they are played less like musical instruments and more like laser guns at a panic attack-inducing arcade. The songs are blurts and blasts of zip-zap noise and musical non sequiturs with a churning undertow of blarf and ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK-ACK. The fellas look chill but might also be high-maintenance, so join me in saying ‘Sup, Normal Divas?
