well on the name alone I couldn’t leave this in the shop. Sadistic bomb fuckers is described on its website as “belgium metal punk” and that’s a very good description because belgium isn’t even an adjective. Its hard to oversell or undersell. Its dumb ass crusty punk music you could probably think up in ten minutes with the production of an 80’s thrash album that makes everyone sound like their being recorded from another room. However, like the name, its gleeful in its idiocy. The singer doesn’t sing as much as puke the lyrics out. The guitars are fizzy and thick as cement blocks, and by the end it literally devolves into a bunch of cheap sounding explosion sound effects. None of this is bad. Its perfect for what its trying to do, and immensely dumb fun. Even the description of “belgium metal punk” but not “belgian” because the tape is recorded in brooklyn and more than likely done by a band in brooklyn says it all. This one has a bandcamp, but when I look up the record label I could be convinced that the entire record label is one weirdo making ridiculous music under pseudonyms as none of these bands seem to have any repeat releases or presence anywhere outside of these cassettes. I’ll definitely be following them from this point on the same way you would follow someone that just did 10 lines of cocaine and is now heading out the door with a baseball bat.

ho lee shit is this one bad. I swear this is true, my boombox stopped playing this one. Like straight up said no. at first I thought it was the tape player dying, but then it played the other tapes fine. So while clearly that’s because there’s something the matter with the tape, I like to imagine my boombox just refusing on the grounds that this is terrible and it wont listen to it anymore. There’s clearly something going on here that I like. Its extremely slow dischordant ambient noise metal? However, there’s a fine line between something weird and slow that requires your attention and something that is just wasting your time going nowhere. And after a few minutes of patiently waiting for something to happen I was openly saying “you’ve got to be fucking kidding me” to an empty room. It sounds like the guitar and bass parts were accidentaly bounced to tape a half a second off out of time of each other and the singer sounds like he’s whispering about ghosts with a bucket on his head. Once again, this one was about two dollars, and I got two dollars out of it just for the fact that my tape player went on strike halfway through it. it is notable that looking up this band’s history it seems like one person who makes an album every ten seconds considering the discography page. I can’t hate this too much. Its trying something weird and I appreciate that. But its not very good and considering how I can find recordings of the same project ten years later that sounds virtualy the same I can say its not something I’ll be seaking out any time soon

this cassete has arnold the governator schwarzenegger wearing a swastika pin on the cover. So you know this is a punk band from LA. Got to be honest here. When I saw the swastika I looked this band up on my phone to make sure the place I’d been frequenting wasn’t selling nazi shit. The super punk rock photocopied cover made it so I didn’t realize it was ahnold until I had been looking at it for the entire length of the cassette. I originally thought it was gavin newsum which these days would have been funnier anyway considering his recent charlie kirk interview. When I looked them up I found a show review saying that they were a standout in the punk scene of the time and were much more “soulful” than the other bands, and also that it was mostly latino members who sang in spanish (which lead me to not worry about the cover). Got to be honest here. I’m more into punk than metal but this washed completely over me. Its catchy enough but it just sounds like early circle jerks or black flag, complete with a singer that sounds like ron reyes. I’m sure their concerts were fun but there’s not enough different here to make this interesting. This is clearly the first release of a band with some buzz back when it came out, and they sound young. I flipped on some of their later stuff and they definitely got better for what its worth. But its still just an above average local band.

alright. Let me set the stage here. You get out of a train station in williamsburg brooklyn, the hipster capital of the aughties. This is the home of matt and kim, handlebar mustaches, and “you’ve probably never heard of it” culture. It used to be an absolute shithole abandoned industrial area until all of the trust fund hipsters congregated there seeminly at random and drove rents through the roof and half of it closed. Every person you see looks absolutely ridiculous. Like a cross between joey ramone and max headroom. You pass about 70 grafitti murals on decrepit closed down factories and giant vintage clothing stores to go to a record store that straight up you cant even tell is still in business until you’re inside of it. They’re playing what sounds like a depressed sewing machine complaining about its day through a stack of guitar pedals and a few desk fans. You go over to the cassettes and you start thumbing through the noise section. Something catches your eye. Its kelly green and the art is bizarre. Its named after a mental illness and the cover seems to be a welders mask that’s been photocopied so many times all you can make out is a blackish smear. You look at the track listing and it says stuff like “shitbag” and “craving”. So you think you’re in for some premium guy-dying-at-the-bottom-of-a-well-core. Just absolute nihilistic harsh noise or something that would be the perfect background accompaniment to your neo pagan ritual/ketamine orgy. Instead you bring it home and its 90’s rave music straight out of a playstation 1 game. Like. This would be rotterdam hardcore if there were more samples. Its fine. Techno is one of those genres where it either grabs me immediately or not at all, and this is a not at all situation. That doesn’t mean its bad. Its good enough and even catchy. But I cant help but feel this is background music with ambitions outside of what its capable of. A good recommendation if you like happy hardcore but can’t read to it because of all of the samples of anime girls yelling

This is a brutal crust punk band with next to no information about them left online. I’m going to be honest here. I didn’t feel anything about this one. I straght up cant tell these crust punk bands apart. As a matter of fact, if you told me crust punk was an elaborate prank where every band is playing the exact same song over and over again I would be inclined to believe you. but its a solid release. Pretty heavy hitting and fast. Tons of wild guitar solos over oompa loompa polka beat drums and a guy screaming like he’s angry because the government made him swallow a cheese grater. I’m not even that opposed to formulaic music if the formula is fun, I like black metal which I also can barely tell apart. The cassette comes in a case with an anarchy symbol painted into the back and a scavenged maxwell cassette (fancy grey looking ones) that was taped over to make this. They then pulled off most of the label of the tape and spray painted it. After the recording ended whatever it was taped over started playing random disco or something, which is one of my favorite parts of the cassette because that’s the sort of stuff you don’t get with digital. A good recommendation if you’re mad at society and your memory isn’t any good because of all the glue you’ve been sniffing.

I picked this up from the metal section hoping it was black metal. Once again, I’m picking these at random so I’m guessing. I chose this one mainly because the release of a rehearsal reminds me of vlad tepes, an early french black metal project from a scene called les legions noires, the scene of which is both so horrible its silly and some of my favorite black metal I’ve ever listened to. Most of that scene’s releases were recordings of rehearsals, sometimes with the same song played more than once on the same release. Not because they didn’t care, but because it was essentially all home taping shared between friends that got released later after the fact. Once again I found a bandcamp, this one is describing the band as “satanic black death body horror”. Now, I don’t like death metal but I do like black metal because *I’m* a singer and screaming and yelping seems like a choice and growling and burping into a microphone doesn’t. That doesn’t mean death metal is a bad genre, its just that the bad vocals ruin it for me. So if I had to describe this tape I would say its all of the good technical in your face energy of death metal within the less self serious zaniness of black metal, or at least as zany as either genre can get when half of the audience thinks they’re part of some grand artistic social revolution and the other half thinks they’re at a satan themed jimmy buffet concert. This tape blew my balls off. Its definitely my favorite of this trip. It has a two sided insert, which is kind of rare in home releases. The inside has three dorks grimacing under long hair and hooded robes, baritone claws filled with chains in a basement. As my friend put it when I sent him the picture “thats going to sound exactly what it looks like”. And he was right. They correctly understood the assignment. Imagine everything you like about bands like mayhem and immortal mixed with everything you like about early morbid angel with enough irony and silliness that you don’t have to brush your teeth and apologize like you do after admitting you still listen to mayhem. They clearly took all of the joyful parts of either style and left the rest, and the result is a blast. If theres one band I’m most likely to show up to a concert of, its this one.