Guy Lochhead, 24/12/10
American doom metal three-piece formed in Spring 1994 in San Jose, California. Their songs are characterised by pessimistic, misanthropic lyrics; huuuuge, slooooow chords; choice speech samples and Star Wars references. They broke up in 2001 and band members went on to form Human Anomoly, Graves At Sea, High Tone Son Of A Bitch and tons of other side projects. They released one album, ‘Erode The Person’, in 1998. Their many 7″s and split EPs have been compiled onto two compilations, ‘Failing Early, Failing Often’ (2001) and confusingly-titled-but-unrelated-to-the-album ‘Erode The Person’ (2006). I can’t express just how much I love this band. The. greatest. band. ever. They match the most blown-out, heavy, heavy, heavy sludge metal with the most knowledgeably pessimistic lyrics and samples ever and a brilliant blackly comic habit of equating real world disasters to the sort of polarised good/bad divisions seen in the Star Wars franchise’s Jedi/Sith conflicts. This sets them apart from other mopey doomers. It simultaneously undermines and reaffirms their outlook on humanity – highlighting the fact they’re just a stupid band but drawing attention to the stupidity of humans’ construction of stupid shit like Star Wars, pairing the massiveness of their instrumentation with the massiveness of language like ‘Jundland Wastes’ and the impossible Utopian referencing of something like Alderaan/impossibly evil symbolism of the Death Star. I want to include the album, the compilations and the ‘Embraced By The Anti-Self’ 7″ for its amazing artwork by Nagasaki and Hiroshima survivors. If I decide to only include one thing, it’ll be the album. We’re capable of building A-bombs and forming rock bands. Stupid humans. Noothgrush subversively recycle mainstream, widely-understood, cultural elements in the fringest of metal genres, without any of the machismo that often creeps into niche metal. They’re perfect. There’s so much history and so much has been done, of course we have to make bands like this. To think they were doing this at the time of ’90s pop and alternative rock is incredible… Read their lyrics. I love you, Noothgrush.