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Toxic Holocaust
Chemistry of Consciousness
Relapse Records
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Words cannot express how happy it makes me that metalheads are taking acid again. It got pretty dark there in the 90s after the DEA shut down pretty much every decent chemist in the country, save for a few hippies cooking in the forests. We were left with black metal musicians who wouldn’t know a good time if it blew its own head off in their living room and death metal that got so over-the-top technical that it became boring to even think about.
There was nu-metal and (shudder) rap-met- al dominating the airwaves, but that’s barely worth mentioning at this point, isn’t it? Things were looking grim for folks that wanted to flip up their hats, don a bullet belt and battlekutte combo, and just party down as hard as hu- manly possible. These were the thrashers and they waited patiently on their friends’ couches, surrounded by empty cans of cheap beer for the sun to rise once again on this noble genre.
Enter Toxic Holocaust. Singer Joel Grind was presumably riding his motorcycle some- where around the nuclear wasteland that sur- rounds the barren outskirts of Hell when he nearly passed a huge wooden chest covered in spikes and skulls. Screeching sideways to halt, he kicked open the lid and discovered a Flying V guitar and the entire discography of GBH, Municipal Waste, Sodom, and Venom. Possessed by the thrash, he returned to Port- land, formed Toxic Holocaust, and inspired an army of youths to take drugs, have kinky sex, drink liquor, and abuse hair straighteners and shoestring headbands.
Three albums later, they remain the undis- puted kings of thrash, and their newest Chem- istry of Consciousness carries that torch straight to the gates of Heaven with one goal: burn it to the ground and trip out on the ashes. The single and accompanying music video, “Acid Fuzz,” is an amazing visual mix of the psyche- delic influenced imagery of High on Fire’s “Fer- tile Green” and the hilarious cartoon violence of Municipal Waste’s “You’re Cut Off.”
If you’ve never seen a cartoon pig in a po- lice uniform squashed, sliced up by a giant razor, and snorted by a giant devil with huge tits, I’d recommend stopping whatever you’re doing now, buying a thirty pack, breaking ev- ery light bulb in your house, and watching this on repeat until Armageddon. There’s just too much awesome stuff in it to watch once. Je- sus a la Passion of the Christ eaten by a dragon?
Toxic Holocaust: Chemistry of Consciousness
Got it. Sharks eating zombie suicide bombers with jetpacks? Got ‘em. Toxic devil priests summoning giant cobras with syringe fangs? Oh, yeah, buddy, they got that, too.
The rest of the album is dead-on as well, complete with a cover of L-7’s “Wargasm,” which whipped me into such a frenzy I’m now single, homeless, and shunned at even the sleaziest bars. It was totally worth it. Chemis- try of Consciousness is available online through the mighty Relapse Records, as well as what- ever real life record stores may or may not still exist.
Side note on Relapse Records, the owner also runs a couple pizza shops in Portland called Sizzle Pie where all the slices are named with punk and metal themed monikers. They have a Police and Thieves, a Rudimentary Penne, and their vegan pizza is called Slaugh- ter of the Soil. Some people are so good at be- ing awesome, it’s not even fair to the rest of us.
Anyhoo, the album is utterly amazing and it bears mention this was mastered by none oth- er than Brad Boatright, whose work with Sleep, From Ashes Rise, and Nails is an endorsement solely by proxy. Go buy this, get some bud- dies together, and party like the champions we all know the Noise readership is.
— Mike WIlliams
Let the World Die & Towardis
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There I was in a dingy house party halfway across the country from my warm desert home in Arizona and, on a bookshelf surrounded by animal skulls, books on veganism and the oc- cult, and other such assorted punker stuff, was the self-released demo from none other than Flagstaff’s own Let The World Die.
Amazed, I stopped one of the party-goers as they went into the bathroom for a fresh cup of Pabst lovingly cradled in an ice-filled bath- tub. “You have this here?” I asked and, through the overwhelming smell of beer breath and slurred speech, it was that they had played here a few months ago and had indeed tore the roof clean off. Any band that can so seam- lessly blend face-melting grindcore with dis- torted, laid back ska grooves is bound to make an impression.
The sound brings to mind the best aspects of crust and grind with a healthy dose of “crack-ska,” but any association with Leftover Crack and Choking Victim at this point is, at best, a bit of nostalgia for us old scumbags and, more realistically, a deep, deep insult to the personal caliber of these musicians. To
say that Mark, Paulie, and Jamie are consum-
36 • DECEMBER 2013 • the NOISE arts & news • thenoise.us