DIG THAT
BODY UP, IT’S ALIVE – a corpse is forever
(LP, rock
is hell)
Dig that body up, it’s alive demand the listener to
know that they are a death metal band. Or rather were. Or actually never
were. Here is the story of how this band came about: Deep in the
mid-Eighties a bunch of kids used to hang out together in front of the lokal
K-Mart. There they mostly listened to hip hop and gangsta rap, because they
were white suburban kids of well off parents. Not rich, but definitely well
off. During one summer an elder cousin from the country, tattooed and all,
of one of the boys visited them, heard them listening to hiphop, so he beat
them all up, crushed their tapes and left them with some copies of Slayer. What else?
So the boys listened to that instead, but turning the music loud enough to
scare away any other, elder cousins that might be listening to Twisted
Sister and Judas Priest. Next they all grew beards and beads and went
downtown to buy used gear and drugs. Three of them bought baseball cards and
skateboards, so they were instantly beat up by the rest of the gang and
kicked out of suburbia. These three finally wound up on a inter-state
Greyhound that went the route San Francisco – Los Angeles – New York in
a three week roundloop. On that bus they stayed for the next two or three
months until they were old enough to join the army, after which they got
strewn into all kinds of directions, camps and wars and never saw each other
again to this day, though they sometimes skype.
But before they were disjoined, the got drunk on cider
and formed the idea for a band. This idea became alive a few years later
when there was a strange accident in a chemical factory that was near a
geysir, and that is where DTBUIA comes from. The band only existed for a
mosquito’s breath and then dissolved again, but leaving a short recording
for the world to listen to. How this tape ever made it to Jochen of Rock is
Hell records and what the unholy role of Nate Denver in this play is, is a
story too long and strange to be told here – and after the one before you
might start to have little doubts on my trustworthiness. Let’s suffice to
say that it is a match made in heaven, because these people share a
fascinating and exciting fondness for the off beat, off kilter, off side
amusements that life offers.
“a corpse is forever” is not true, but that is
okay. Musically, it is harsh, noisy, rehearsal room death metal with too
much sideway looks at noise rock, improv and the avantgarde, from Lightning Bolt
to Harry Pussy and from the Ruins to Jesus Lizard and then back again. But I
mostly like Slayer for their sound and the unbelievable amounts of
variations they reap from a single riff. If you have a friend of a cousin of
yours, who says he is into “black metal”, then he probably won’t
listen to this. If you have an elder colleague, who says he has been
collecting all kinds of metal for years now, then he probably never heard of
this band. If you meet an avid metal collector, very much like the young
Lars Ulrich, then he might frown at you, but he has never heard or seen
anything of this band. Because DTBUIA is something like a house party death
metal band. They might play your basement if you invite at least a dozen
other kids to smash the place, but they won’t do a gig that has door
entry. On the other hand they don’t shy away from writing, playing and
recording a fantasy epos of a death metal song. An epos that evolves into a
super large size noise drone with pounding drums and heavily distorted
guitars and a bass going ba-ba-booom over and over again. Think Stephen
O’Malley or Dale Crover, if you find some energy to think at all. For old
noisenicks like me definitely the musical highlight of the record.
