HOW TO SHOW YOU'RE GRATEFUL

I've been made homeless for a bit and 'cos he is awesome, 'arr lad Kristoffer let me doss on his sofa for a few days when he was away. Here is a list of things I told him I was doing when he was away:

"I had a massive wank and got so excited I came and shit myself all over the sofa, but I used your yellow Bad Brains t-shirt to clean it up so it's ok"

"Your girlfriends underwear fit me much better than your do"

"I can't find your porn, I've look everywhere"

"I'm having a small party here later, couldn't find anyone to come so I just went down to the booze shop and rounded up the people sat outside"

There is a Swedish thing, with no English translation so we will call it "nubbing" - when you put the end of our cock on something that someone will then use/touch.

"I've nubbed 15 things in your house, you have to guess which ones, the clues are that I have not washed so you can use your sense of smell - the first object is something you put toothpaste on"

This is how you show you appreciate things right? Or?

IN THE RAG

Nice little bit about me and my book in the newspaper from my old hometown in the UK.

WORTH YOUR TIME THIS WEEK

Two bands today to go check out:

COROSUKE - Are from Japan and have ties with the amazing GALLHAMMER - expect screaming and grunting and crushing riffs, kinda like if Gallhammer were a lot less Amebix/Bathory and more Vision Of Disorder/Earth Crisis.

Checky outy HERE

Loving also this week is G'Burg's AGRIMONIA.

Lastest LP "Host Of The Winged" came out recently on Profane Existence. Totally dark, brooding atmospheric crust punk, best I've heard in a long time - go checky out HERE and if you're in the area they will be playing with BLACK BREATH in Gothenburg on Nov 8th at Truckstop.

Q: AND COSTNER. A: AND COSTNER

SIMPLE RULES FOR HOLLYWOOD WHEN MAKING A "HISTORICAL"/FANTASY MOVIE BASED IN THE UK:

Braveheart, Highlander, Robin Hood (both Costner and Crowe), King Arthur and so on and so on - whenever an American film company makes a movie of such a topic I just sit waiting to point out the faults, here are a few that Hollywood should listen to:

RULE ONE - ETHNICITY

# Hire an actor that is actually from the country he is meant to be from. Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins anyone? Right - there's your first clue, it doesn't get any better when Mel Gibson or worse Christopher Lambert tries to be Scottish and sounds more like Groundskeeper Willie, or Russell Crowe does a non-descript English accent.



# Remember that when you're talking about (for example) North England in the 1100s, there would not be a small town with a population of 25 people all with different English accents, or in the case of Braveheart, Scottish. They would all have the same accent.

# If your film is before the 12th century forget having Irish or Welsh etc in the film - they were still speaking Gaelic, not English.

# There were no non-whites.

# Medieval England didn't have anything Celtic until after the 11th century or "Vikingy" until after the 8th.

RULE TWO - GEOGRAPHY

# In Braveheart they go from Scotland to York via Wonder Woman's invisible plane I think. In the new Robin Hood they go from Nottingham to Dover in the blink of an eye - in King Arthur, Hadrians Wall seems to seperate Cornwall from England and not the northest of England and Scotland.

# In the Dark or Medieval ages people traveled on horseback or foot, there we no paths, or maps, it took a long while to travel. In most of these films people, even entire armies seem to be able to transport between places far away in a matter of hours. William Wallace must have a railcard in Braveheart considering the amount of running about he does.

RULE THREE - HISTORY

# Do I even need to go into this? Stripey Tartan? Haircuts, make-up, washing powder, cars, cellphones.....

************

EARS: AGRIMONIA, AMBULANCE, MASTODON
EYES: DOCTOR WHO, TORCHWOOD, GREMLINS
HANDS: KURT VONNEGUT - CAT'S CRADLE

GEEK? MOI?

Yeah OK, I am - first of the things I bought with my book royalties came through today, the GATCHAMAN God Phoenix model, yet to be painted and looking ace, but it's ace all the same! All the way from Korea - a childhood wish fulfilled, and that's what life is all about eh!

If you think that I am geeky, here are some more shots from around my house:

Retro Robot/spaceship collection

Remote control flying robots by a cardboard cut out Luke Skywalker-me

Darth Vader light/frame in the bedroom.

Why you ask? Well simply because - I can. I like it, and I can - raa me.

FIREY PHOENIX IN YOUR FACE!

DEY TUK UR JOBS!...DEY TUK UR JOBS!

Fuck being an actor or trained in any kind of theatrical arts these days - you won't need it in the future, soon even Hollywood will stop using actors for films and instead just get a bunch of "real" people and film them going about their daily lives.

When I was a kid there were actual TV shows - they had actors doing exciting stuff in well written plots and stuff. VERY hard to come by these days.

The reality TV-show participant is the TV equivalent of the immigrant worker. Cheaper, non-union, easier to find, easier to replace.

TOP TV SHOWS OF THE 70s:

Dukes Of Hazzard
Happy Days
Charlies Angels
M*A*S*H
Dallas
Taxi

TOP TV SHOWS OF THE 80s

Family Ties
The Cosby Show
Cheers
Dynasty
Golden Girls
Miami Vice
21 Jump Street
Moonlighting

TOP TV SHOWS OF THE 90s

Simpsons
Sex & The City
Friends
Seinfield
X-Files
Deep Space 9
Beverly HIlls 90210

And in 2010...

I have no idea but I will just look at what is on today for example:

Real Housewives Of..
Swedish New-York Wives
Fear Factor
Amazing Race
Paradise Hotel
Idol
Robinson
Gordon Ramsey
Supersize vs Superskinny
Single Mother Seeks
Neighbour-feud
Farmer Seeks Wife
....and about 30 different programs about either someone cooking or someone buying/doing up a house.

Pattern? DEY TUK UR JOBS!!!!!

Personally I have noticed that I can throw away my TV and just watch things on the web from yesteryear as these reality TV things hold no interest for me at all - fuck 'em and fuck anyone who wants to be on reality TV.

Quick test:

• Fonzie going "ayyyy" vs :- Someone showing you round a house "and here is the kitchen..."
• The General Lee jumping over a haystack vs :- Some people laying on a beach talking.
• Mulder & Scully being chased by an alien vs :- Someone making a trifle.
• Johnny Depp chasing people round in a police car vs :- a Swedish woman buying covers for the sofa.

Crap eh. Fuck TV.

NU ÄR DET SLUT PÅ VECKAN...

Sweden has many traditions that are different from the Brittish - and I find most of them intolerant and pointless. Except for Friday's weekly ritual "Fredagsmys" which kinda translates to "Friday-cosy-time". The more rock & roll among us refer to it as "Fredags-MÖS" (Mat, Öl, Sex - food, beer, sex). To be honest I kinda like it.

The young single among us must like Friday as the night to let loose and rock out all over the town - but the old gits among us love the Fredagsmys. For most it means some films, a big bag of crisps/chips, some candy and doing fuck-all until the morning.

How will the Elk spend his Friday night? - Pizza and chips, lots of the series TORCHWOOD (see below) and some new batteries to charge up the skybots (see below, below).

Nice, party Saturday...if I bother.

THE BAND HAGS

Groupies.....so passé, The Band Aids...most of them died of AIDS, The Plaster Casters...no use since most rock bands don't have dicks these days - so where does the average mid-level band go these days for female comfort* - into the scene comes a new generation...THE BAND HAGS.

A fag-hag as we all know is a woman who is usually found in the company of homosexual guys, and the band-hag, well, is usually found in the company of bands.

It's not just the girls...but for the purposes of this post, it is. The band hag is usually a better-to-mid looking girl (ugly friends do tag along but are usually found crying in the bathroom later in the night in a bid for attention) that is usually slightly smarter than your average hanger-on. This is how they manage to keep the band interested enough to have her around for eye-candy but never put her into that "groupie" bracket because they can also be interesting to talk to.

The band normal doesn't form any sort of sexual or physical relationship with the band-hag but it is common to be "seeing" a member of the band from time to time (ie: you're that shag in that town) or to fall into bed with one in desperate times.

Usually they come with labels and disguises - Photographer, Merch Girl, Promoter even. When a band reaches a certain level the band-hags will appear and the smarter bands will "employ" them from time to time in a "well if you're gonna be around at least make yourself useful" way.

The band hags can be found tagging themselves on Facebook in photos with various members of bands who they have become internet buddies with - or at every party amusing the lowly folk with tales of how they hung out with the bass player of Roy's Garden Swingers**. They count the almost famous as their friends yet it is rarely reciprocated.

Most band-hags may have a talent, but they are not in the band, but can be found hanging around the backstage, getting in on the guestlist (the band figures if she comes free her ugly friend will pay).

Oh the band-hag, any thing to feel a little bit more special and important than a "normal" person. Some people write blogs.


*I realise I'm being slightly phallocentric - but I Just learned that word today and needed to use it.
**I just made them up.

JACK BAUER 'EM UP!

Been watching a few old films of late - Superman 1 & 2, Airplane 1 & 2 and few others from the 70s/80s and realised one thing that was really noticeable when you watch them these days.

There are criminals and terrorists and...all of them are white!

Does art mimmic life or life mimmic art? These days in all of our movies if we wanted a street thug gang-type fella, he'd 99.9% of the time be black right? Or if we wanted a terrorist, middle-eastern.

Is the way that the mass media portray the enemy effecting the racial judgement of the S.W.M* or is the mass media run by the true enemy - diverting our attention to certain ethnic groups so that an evil S.W.M can slip under the radar and do the real damage?

Discuss in groups.

On the cooler side of things, 'arr lad Kristoffer has started off his own blog, which I would imagine would be covering a lot punk rock, music, political gambits, comics, star wars, other geek stuff and the like and no doubt I will steal from every time I run out of ideas.

It's in Swedish so if you know the talk go peeky: HERE

Where's my semtex?

*Straight White Male FYI.

SUCCUBUS ARISE!

Carrying on today with my "bands I used to be in" theme - it was the end of the 80s and the start of a new decade, and just like the metal junkie I was...thrash metal just wasn't doing it for me any more, and so entered a new style into my collection....death metal!

The small town I lived in had a number of "metal" fans, myself and my friends and another group of older, scarier looking guys that we didn't really know.

Succubus - '89

One day, not long after I turned 15 I was out and about on the town doing my usual bought of under-age drinking when I started to sit with a bunch of these older kids who were crowded round a stereo under a shop doorway listening to BATHORY. I happened to have an AMEBIX cassette in my pocket and convinced them to whack it on and before long we were drinking and chatting away. Then it came that they had a band and were looking for new members...within seconds, I was in.

The band was called SUCCUBUS and was grabbing onto the latest death metal trend spreading throughout the world like wild fire - hey, it all sounded the same and had the name Scott Burns, James Murphy or Glen Benton attached to it somewhere but I'd rather that trend than glam rock or "e-mo", at least it had some balls!

So - I was in the band. It was myself on guitar, Matt on guitar, Andy on bass, Nathan on vocals and another Matt on drums. Everyone in Clevedon is called Matt.

For the time we were pretty good I guess, no one else in that area was doing much the same....or I think there was a Christian death metal band from Nailsea but....who knows. Off the radar.

L-R - Matt, Andy, Me

One demo popped out - recorded in true style on a stereo in the middle of the room in one take with all of hushy hush-ing between the songs. We played two gigs - one in a squat and one in a large empty hall - awesome.

Death Metal came and passed as a fad but some of the music id still ace right through to this day, and the guys in the band were older than me so looked after me like big brothers, in fact, Matt and Andy practically became family, Matt still is to this day.

The band broke up when we tried to introduce some other influences and there was a divide between the true and the untrue - the "true" side (drummer Matt and Nathan) carried on with the band but did nothing to it - Matt is now part of a DJ pair called The Beat Monkeys who do well, Nathan records stuff on his own still as far as I know, I have not seen him for many years.

Matt & Me in my death metal jumper

We the untrue went on to form another band which did nothing at all much but I will tell of that in another post - Matt (the other one) has since done about 10,000 other bands, some with me.

Death metal was ace - I loved it all and still do - hooray for the short time with Succubus! There are some songs

HERE

and

HERE

(Connects to FB probably)

Now and then:

Andy - (he's the one at the back btw)

Matt (centre)

Me...

YOU CAN DANCE IF YOU WANNA

I never use this word as a term of insult. In fact if I hear or see anyone else use it a derogatory term they usually feel my wrath, but when it comes to today's topic there just is no other word I can think of to use.

GAY.

What's today's topic? Dancing. Dancing and programs about people dancing, including Let's Dance, So You Think You Can Dance, Strictly Come Dancing and America's Best Dance Crew.

A crew? Is that tough and hard? You and all your gangsta friends prancing about like a bunch of....well, gays? There is just one word for it.

REALLY FUCKING GAY.

I liked dancing - in the 80s when breakdancing was all the rage I used to spin on my head and do the catapillar like no one's biscuits, it looked like this:

See! Gay!

One day I stopped and realised that if I ever wanted to have sex with girls I would need to stop all this right away. And then, several years later it's come back in squads! Crews! Crew? Like a crew of sailors? Like in the navy? Like this?:

There is nothing hard or cool or gangster about standing in a room with a bunch of your mates and rehearsing your timed jumps, spins, pliés, or deciding which tutu to wear.

Dancing = gay.

I HAVE SPOKEN!

TRANSSSSSSSSS-MUTE!

Well, y'know how I love to ram it in the ass of the so-called "big" bloggers and one thing they usually do is chat about what they ate* and what they bought. So I'll bite.

Today I actually bought something awesome - a toy Godphoenix from Gatchaman! It's the plastic, cheaper version on my dream-toy.

Why do I want this so bad? Well, Gatchaman (or "Battle Of The Planets/G-Force" as we knew it in the UK) was a Japanese cartoon that was on the telly when I was a kid that I loved so much I sought out versions of it in my adulthood. It was this one: (see below pic) if you can remember it.

When I was a kid I had a friends who had a toy Godphoenix and I can remember everything about how much I loved it. The one I bought is in plastic, his was a mix of plastic and die-cast. I remember every little hinge and bit and how it felt, sounded and smelt - I have found this rare toy on Ebay a few times but never for under 100 dollars! Anyway the plastic one will do for now.

Why the buying of this slightly unneeded luxury - I got my first royalty check from my book! Go me!

*I had a a veggie-snitzel with organic dark bread cooked in garlic butter with ketchup, mustard, red pepper. Y'know, in case it is important to write these things.

S'GETTING HOT IN HERE

Often I hear people say - "Greg, you're an international hero, ladies man, influence to many, undercover spy, demi-god, rock lord and world's number one breakdancer...but how do you earn your money?"

Of course I've had jobs - mostly a bunch of shitty ones but today I'll take you back a few years to a job I had that really changed a lot for me.

I'd been kicked in the balls by Hard Rock Cafe so I looked for another shop job and eventually found one in a shop - had no idea what the shop was before I walked into the interview only to find out it was a sex shop. Now of course I had nothing against this, in fact I thought that it was awesome! And I got the job.

Now, the shop was part of the bigger place - it was an all-in-one stop. A shop on the top floor, below that was a strip club and below that was a "cinema" (read: little booths where you sit and have a wank).

After working for a while I ended up floating between all three - and working nights. Surrounded by naked women, porn and dildos....should be heaven right? Wrong, it was hell.

My eyes were opened wide to the industry which was the worst one I have ever seen - I lost my hope in mankind after working in a place like that - and here are some of the reasons.

Now, most of the strippers were pretty cool. In fact I became friends with a lot of them. Being an older guy that had no interest in them sexually (in fact most of them thought that I was gay as I never tried anything with them) I became something of a big brother. But the rest of them....complete bitches! Never have I known that there were so many girls in the world that were so willing to degrade themselves for a quick buck. And I'm not just talking about the stripping - I'm talking about pretty much hanging off a guy's leg as he tries to walk away crying "give me money! give me money!" And a few more bucks for that "something extra"....oh yes.

The ones that I liked were awesome (I am still friends with some today) but the others...forget it. I could spit on them, really. One in particular really got to me, she actually appeared on a Swedish TV show a while ago in which she claimed "I may be a stripper but it doesn't mean I take drugs or have sex with the customers". Well...I nearly choked on my Code Red. I hated her from the moment I was working in the shop above and she brought in a John drunk off his mind and convinced him to buy her a very expensive bag, but she tried to get me to charge the card twice so she could have two. From that moment on we were enemies. She danced all through her pregnancy finding no shortage of customers that liked that sort of thing, she tried to get into the porn world and drugs.....well, she was fired for trying to sell drugs to a John.

I thought dancing while pregnant was horrible - yet we had one young girl from Columbia that did it....and when I spoke to her about it I realised that this poor immigrant that couldn't manage more than a few words in either Swedish or English wasn't doing it out of spite, she was doing it because she had no other choice.

And the Johns....OMG! I've never met so many disgusting, degraded, rude, arrogant assholes in my life.

The "cinema" - forget it. Once a night I had to go down and make sure all the porn dvds were running properly, which meant a little while spent trolling through 50+ dvds of mixed sort of porn while walking by grown men bashing one out. We often found syringes and so on in the booths - of course a little dark place was perfect for that sort of thing.

I gave up drinking, sex and hope during this time. When they offered me a full time job I said no - I would rather be poor than live like that.

METAMORPHOSIS

Got my old walkman out of the basement this week (tempted to sellotape an apple to it and say it's an Ipod) and am working my way through a bunch of demo tapes - thought it might be a nice op to write a bit about my past endevours with music.

My first "real" band was called METAMORPHOSIS - we ruled.

L-R: Stu, Aaron, Chris, Me

I guess the band started around 87 or 88 when we were around 12 or 13 as a band called "Ultra Violet". I played the guitar ("played") Stu sang and played keyboards (hey it was the 80s!) and Aaron played "backing keyboards". It was the 80s, we wore day-glo clothes and sang about arcade games and skateboarding. When we discovered rock music we became Metamorphosis, a real rock band. Stu played the guitar and sang, I played the guitar, Aaron played the drums and a guy called Chris who was older then us played the bass - except for most of our recordings one of us played the bass.

It was quite a fun band to be honest, we we quite punk rock - only because we wanted to be a metal band but we were not good enough, and we had too many other influences.

Listening to it now it's quite "advanced" considering how young we were. The band name itself comes from the Kafka book and a lot of our lyrics came from poetry and books, Richard Adams (yeah, way before Fall Of Efrafa), Tolkien and even using the poem "Sunsets" by Richard Adlington to parralell STDs. Most of the other lyrics were about depression or struggle against the right wing - at this time of course Thatcher was in power in the UK.

Only ever 3 in each band pic - one of us had to take the picture!

We recorded everything ourselves at home using a home studio and produced our own demo tapes to sell and booked our own gigs in the town. We were quite fun to watch I guess as we were a "fun" band despite the dark lyrics and played a lot of silly covers including theme tunes from "Beadle's About", "TMNT" and a song that included the 720 theme tune (nice 80s skateboarding arcade game.)

Also we were very young kids and we could play! Not brilliantly but we could shred so the big kids liked us quite a lot.

We did three tapes: The Fuck You Debut, The Ode and ...From An Untitled Poem and stopped playing in about 1991.

Many years later in the mid 90s Stu got the band back together as a sort of Nine Inch Nails style band using computers and stuff - we did one very long demo (it was actually a whole 90 mins) and one gig yet it was this gig that had me longing for playing punk again.

As everything was decided by the backing tape the gig was pretty much set in stone with no room for mucking about or anything - yet I ended up very drunk, at one point I had to take a pee so bad I went in a coke can behind my amp. This ended up spilling all over the floor later. Also, our bassist (Andy, the younger brother of our original bassist) had his finger bitten by a rat just before the gig so was bleeding everywhere for the whole show.

The Mid-90s line up (me centre)

For an encore we got Aaron our old drummer up on stage and bashed through a couple of old Metamorphosis tunes - fast thrashy punk, with the audience right up in our face and people slipping about in the piss and blood - that was pure class, I never looked back!

SIMPSONS - BANSKY

Great TV this fall...new season of Family Guy, The Event, South Park starting again and The Simpsons.

Just watched the latest episode of The Simpsons (Season 22, Episode 3) - which probably won't be on Swedish TV until the year 3535. Anyway, You know how sometimes The Simpsons gets a little bit on the nail with it's politics and likes to make a few stabby statements, as do Family Guy and South Park (who I believe are spot on with everything!).

This new episode however brings the daddy of them all by turning over the creative control of the famous "couch gag" to Bristol artist Bansky.

Banksy btw is from the same town as I am and I remember his street art all over the place - no idea how he got to be so hip. I love his stuff but now it's a bit "cool" to have his stuff so I fear he's in danger of becoming the new Che Guevara T-shirt. Hope not.

ANYWAY....The Simpsons intro - a VERY dark and bold statement against American consumerism and the way it is created, much more a huge slap in the face for the FOX Network. It's even quite evil to the creators of The Simpsons themselves.

You're curious...I shall deliver - enjoy!

MACHETE DON'T TEXT

Was it awesome? You bet your sweet ass! Did make me think though - is the Grindhouse style just movie post-modernism?

We wouldn't be so keen to watch a "bad" action movie with Steven Sea-Gull in it yet when we know it's created to be almost a parody of a bad action movie, a tounge in cheek nod to the classics and an over the top mirror to a genre we usually avoid - then it's great!

Reckon?

Oh, and Lindsey Lohan gets her wubblers out.

I shouldn't like them but...

....it's been a long while since I've seen CRASH DIET, I haven't even seen them with the new singer yet!

As most of you know I was a roadie-monkey boy for them a while back (fans, check any bootleg vids you might have, from the Unattractive era, you'll see me!)

Anyway, just wanted to wish 'em a bit of luck - go check them out because for glam rockers they do get my approval - and that's a big honor!

PARANORMAL ENCOUNTERS OF THE WHATEVER KIND

Riddle me this: Why do have such a hard time comming to terms with the existence of ghosts, yet I'm perfectly happy to accept the posibility that earth has been visited by aliens?

Maybe it's the scientist in me* that can accept that there could be life outside our own universe that comes down to visit...that much could be true. Although I have no idea why it would be kept all secret and hush hush. If we were clever enough to go to another planet would we not come down and say "ta da!!!" and not sneak in - float down with our UFO in silent mode going "shhhhhh" while trying not to giggle, hide it behind a tree like in Back To The Future and then run around hiding under boxes before returning to earth sniggering smugly.

Apart from that bit I can see that maybe already or maybe some time in the future we could really expect a visitation - it stands to reason that the universe is big (and space is deep - blink blink till 138) and there could be something out there.

Yet ghosts....that just gets me. I don't get how in reality a ghost can exists, coupled with the fact that despite one in four people claiming to have seen a ghost there is zero solid evidence. Now, they also say that one in four men are gay (or something like that) even if it was one in five, or one in twenty, even one in 100 that is a hell of a lot of ghosts wandering about - we should be hard pressed not to pop down to the shops for a bottle of milk without bumping into a Shakesperian man floating about with his head under his arm.

Maybe the whole aura that surrounds it is also a pain in the ass - especially with all the TV shows around it. When my girlfriend watched ghosty programs on the TV (and we have no shortage of them here in Sweden) I am forced to leave the room or sit in silence as I can't help coughing "bullshit" under my breath ever 3 minutes.

"Det Okända" (The Unknown) is a Swedish ghost-cum-psychic show with about as much believability as an episode of Blind Date. A medium comes to a house and tells the haunted all about the ghost that lives there....in a style akin to a Vegas mind reader.

Picture it - an old house out in the countryside, family owned through generations and the medium picks up on these things - that at one point a man lived here, maybe a family member, he was old, he dressed in the clothes of the old times and he worked a lot with his hands, maybe his farming was his livelyhood. Now is it just be or could any old cunt tell you that?

I wish I knew the phone numbers of these people as I'd call them up and tell them they have won the "credit card lottery" - all they have to do is give me their credit card details and if their numbers come up they win!

If a ghost is an "echo" or a "recording" of a past time, or a traumatic time then why don't we have ghosts from the dawn of man onwards. Why just from the past hundred years or so. Why are not battle grounds cramped with the undead? And still.....why no fucking proof!

Aliens on the other hand....maybe maybe, I'm not against that. Maybe because in actuality it could happen - Area 51 I think is just a smoke screen, a little like the commercial punk and rap scene - cover the truth with a bigger lie.

*Disclaimer - I am not a scientist, but I have seen all the episodes of The Big Bang theory.

Anyway - some of my fave ghost and ufo vids from the interwebs!

ONE FOR THE BOYS

Which one would make you scream, fling your arms in the air and run for cover faster?

I REEK OF DEAD SKY

Can't get enough this week of CARCASS and AT THE GATES - all the Carcass albums back to back on the mp3 player with At The Gates' "Slaughter Of The Soul" mixed in on the mp3 player - awesome on the way to and from school.

I've been over Carcass before because they are one of the bands that really transgress the boundries of metal and punk, even into extreme punk.

They actually started life as a DIS-Band and those that know them that their history is very mixed in with D-Beat, Hardcore, Punk, Grindcore and all that stuffz. I think it's mostly due to guitarist Bill Steer's style that he was almost mathmatic in his playing that they progressed and incorporated a more metal style. Punk themes such as veganism were always present in the band's outputs.

When Bill Steer joined Napalm Death the terms were that Earache also released an album for his band Carcass.

The band have been described as "Gore-Grind", "Death Metal" Rot N Roll" and more.

Carcass' first album "Reek Of Putrefaction" was something that the band were not happy with - the sound is terrible, mostly because of the short time they had to record it and also because the style they were playing was so new, fast, intense and complex that the studio just didn't know what to do with it. These days it's a good listen but certainly just a reference point.

With the second album "Symphonies Of Sickness" the sound improved and the songs became more listenable - The classic "Exhume To Consume" along with the opener "Reek Of Putrefaction" are complete storming classics.

Third album "Necrotisism - Descanting The Insalubrious" Saw the addition of Mike Amott on guitar and saw a much more metal sound in the album. Many classic Carcass tunes are on this platter - Corporal Jigsaw Quandary, Incarnated Solvent Abuse and more grace this album. Although as a whole this isn't the most amazing album, not every track rocks and even the "hits" outstay their welcome, yet this is Carcass, very involved killer tracks.

With the fourth album "Heartwork" it was a complete breakthrough showing a much more standard death/thrash sound. If you compare it with some other bands and albums of the time it fits right in - At The Gates and more so Kreators "Coma Of Souls" - the only thing missing from this opus is Bill Steer's vocals, Jeff Walker handles all the vocals making them a much more straight forward band.

By the fith album "Swansong" things were starting to "WTF!" Fans were shocked at the almost rock and roll style of this album - listening to it these days it's a pretty fine platter with only a few stinkers - but then we saw the split and because there is a good, the recent reunion - all hail!