Solid Little Rock Jams

Kevin Drumm - Purge

When you are underground noise musician, you release million selling chart-busters that have you making noise with another famous underground noise musician, and for some reason, it's worse than either of the solo releases that you two bros have put out. Also, you release cassettes that are impossible to find because nobody owns a cassette tape player so it doesn't matter that nobody is able to find them. You generally release approximately 73 of these cassettes every two weeks. If you are a lazy cunt, you just put them on CD-R's, take them to the record store, and slip them in with the Cake CDs.

Luckily, Kevin Drumm is a scary bearded ghost man who not only rarely performs, but wisely releases an "official solo release" every year (from about 1999 to 2005) or every couple years (nothing in 2006 from the man!) This is an awesome thing because it makes his discography easy to keep track of, and because he's the fucking MASTER, he is able to keep each one of his releases distinct from the ones around it, and never stays in the same place for long. Each release moves forward from the last, introducing some new element or blowing an existing element out of proportion.

Which brings us to Purge. It is his longest release since 2002's terribly face-melting all-out fucking masterwork Sheer Hellish Miasma. A (presumably) limited amount of copies was put out on iDEAL Recordings, who released Wolf Eyes's Black Wings Over The Sand earlier this year. I downloaded an MP3 rip from a Hipinion YSI thread. It's all one track. It is about an hour long and there are one or two silence breaks. Not sure if there are official "tracks" here, but there could be. The first 15 minutes or so consist of some seriously whited out trebly "suck on this, Matthew Bower" dentist-drill-from-hell noise. Then there's this huge change and it's a fucking rumble in the jungle, let me tell you, and man, it makes me jump the fuck up in surprise and utter terror. Kevin Drumm knows how to vary it up, he does. Throughout this bad boy, we have some horrible screeching whiteness, low-end mega-distorto, seizurous electrospazz, what sounds like heavily treated metal riffing, and some ambient cool-down relaxation to bring it all home. And then just when you think it's all over, the dude lays on some seriously stomach-churning synthesizer fuckery. Quite the journey. For some reason, it ends with a field recording that consists of church bells, somebody playing trumpet, what sounds like a door being slammed, and a brass ensemble playing some slow delightful wedding music or some shit. Kevin Drumm is certainly a weird and funny human being.

Rating: Throughout the decade, Kevin Drumm has been continuously plunging headfirst into new realms of extreme brutality. And boy, is Purge no exception. What a fucking massive work this is, even more scrotum-slashingly abrasive than Land of Lurches or Impish Tyrant. It's good to have him back!

Song: A bunch of pictures that my girlfriend and I took on Photo Booth! God bless TECHNOLOGY, dang