After about thirty seconds the adrenalin sets in; people are screaming and shaking their fists. After a minute you wonder what’s going on. Strobe lights are going mad and you begin to feel the throb in your chest. After another minute, it’s total confusion. People’s faces take on a look of bewilderment. The noise starts hurting. The noise continues. After three minutes you begin to take deep breaths. Some people in the audience stoop down into the crowd and cover their ears and eyes. Anger takes over. A few people leave the room. After about four minutes, a calm takes over. The noise continues. After five minutes, a feeling of utter piece takes over...
Mark Cox on the Apocalypse section of live performances of You Made Me Realise by My Bloody Valentine. Quote taken from The Creation Records Story - My Magpie Eyes are Hungry For The Prize by David Cavanagh Virgin Books, 2000. (Page 370)
You think I’m making all this up don’t you? - John Peel when cueing up Cesspool of Sorrow by Disemboweled Corpse on the 8/11/92 edition of John Peel’s Music.
I don’t want to mislead you. While I like and recommend Cesspool of Sorrow it isn’t in the same class as You Made Me Realise. Stylistically the tracks are a million miles apart too, but I cited My Bloody Valentine here because Cesspool of Sorrow is perhaps the first example of a grindcore track which has afforded me a sense of peace and serenity while listening to it, similar to that which the Apocalypse section of You Made Me Realise tried to lull listeners into. I put it all down to the work of the unidentified bassist because while the guitarist and their feedback are pushed back in the mix, the vocalist growls away to urgently comic effect and the drummer sounds like they’re soundchecking, the whole core of the track revolves around that repetitive, quickening bassline which sparks like synapses and burrows into the heart and brain while all else flails around it. I often find grindcore pretty dreary or forgettable, it’s no surprise that it and death/speed metal have often been poorly represented on this blog despite Peel’s support for the genre. A little bit of Happy Flowers and do Badgewearer count? I hope so given that N’Alien Head is one of my favourite tunes of 1992. But too often the lack of anything to hang on to means that I can pass on most of it. But that bassline throbs away almost hypnotically. Fix yourself on that, block out all else and surrender to some form of inner peace.
Video courtesy of John Peel. Taken from Peel’s Radio 1 show on 14 November 1992 and leading on to...
Video courtesy of Underground Sounds M
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