Album Review: Various Artists, Cadaver Monuments
Posted in Reviews on December 6th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Based in Brest, France, and founded in 2010, Totem Cat Records marks its 50th release in admirably punishing style with the four-way split Cadaver Monuments. Given the opportunity to say something about the imprint’s ongoing mission, Cadaver Monuments teems with curated filth. You start with 16. Okay? That’s where you start. Then you’ve got Arkansas’ Deadbird, and then Nightstick show up and as will happen in such instances, shit goes right off the rails. And to mop up the innards, outtards, uppers and downers is chemically-preserved Ohio mainstays Fistula, who sound at this point like they should be on tour with Cannibal Corpse. That’s Totem Cat declaring who they are? It’s not the entirety of the label’s scope, but while also giving a home to bands like Karma to Burn and Bongzilla — and let’s not forget releasing the most recent offering from Sons of Otis; peace upon it — founder Ewenn Padovan has displayed a penchant for the nastier end of nasty, and in that regard, Cadaver Monuments is one hell of a party.
But understand, this isn’t a party like you show up and there’s a bounce-house or somebody’s got the grill going and you’re playing some tunes in the back yard. This is a party like oops someone just overdosed. Consider the trajectory of the included 13 songs and 53 minutes of music. First of all, it’s hilarious to find a context in which 16 seem like the voice of reason, but even as they launch the collection with “Crust Fund” — the chorus of which just might be, “You suck” — and all due bloodboil, Cadaver Monuments pushes deeper from there with Deadbird‘s generally-semi-hinged atmosludge, the will-forever-be-avant-garde-because-they’re-ahead-of-a-time-that’s-never-coming garage crust wrought by Nightstick, and Fistula‘s death-spreading pestilent extremity, still somehow rooted in punk if not to the degree of Nightstick, who share a sense of suburban fuckery, hopelessness and disillusion. The progression feels purposeful and it is consuming. “Crust Fund” is the shortest cut at 2:30 save for “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” by Nightstick still to come, and is backed by the Black Flag cover “Beat My Head Against the Wall,” which is respectfully delivered, and the Los Angeles mainstays finish “Broken Minds,” an easy pick for a highlight of the split with the kind of violence-inducing chug that 16‘s most recent LP, 2022’s Into Dust (review here), so gloriously proffered.
They are well met by Deadbird, whose sound has always spoken to me of some nighttime threat, probably in the woods, but who doom on “Static Pain” with a lurch that’s more in league with the emotionalism of Warning until the screaming starts, if rawer in the recording. As each band gets about 10-15 minutes, Deadbird complement the original track with a take on Celtic Frost‘s “Dethroned Emperor” that picks up from the drone that ends “Static Pain” with amp noise and that classic riff. I don’t know where or when the band recorded this cover, but it’s a shift in production from “Static Pain” (I think) that keeps clarity even as “Dethroned Emperor” grows madder after its initial verse and continues its thrust toward its coming-apart-but-fuck-it ending. Deadbird don’t do a ton outside their local area, but the band goes back over 20 years — you might recall they’re tight with Rwake, whose frontman CT has taken part and I think does at least some vocals here — and if you can catch them, it would be advisable. The transition from them to Nightstick is the most dramatic aesthetic shift Cadaver Monuments has to make. True to form, swagger and fuckall seal it.
If you’re unfamiliar with the oeuvre of the South Shore, Massachusetts-based experimental unit, they are truly a psychological experience. They begin with “The Ballad of Richie Gardner” — who the hell is Richie Gardner? I don’t know but he’s probably dead or in jail — and tell a tale of local sexual abuse that might have happened in real life before breaking the track in half and jamming out on the kind of riff that makes you go up to them after the show. Nighstick subsequently slunk into a cover of The Beatles‘ “Yer Blues” that is so much more about death than the blues as to remove the pop from one of the greatest pop songwriters of all-time — it rules, it’s scathing, it’s certainly true to the spirit of the original and the lyrics, and I have to think that somewhere out there a 90-year-old experimentalist artist named Yoko Ono would approve. “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” is mostly vocals but has some acoustic guitar and seagulls at the end — folk Americana, about homelessness — and the noise and distortion rumbling in “Elizabeth (For Larry Lifeless)” as the titular name is repeated in drawling fashion, while a woman, presumably Elizabeth, says, “You can’t find me, I’m a ghost,” over and over.
Vague and sad in like proportion and blowing out in the last of its sub-three minutes with jazz drums and consuming static wub, “Elizabeth (For Larry Lifeless)” sounds like what you’d find if American popular culture took off its makeup. Like Swans but working class punk instead of arthouse couture. Of course they finish with a take on Wilson Pickett‘s famous “Land of 1,000 Dances,” grunting out the names of dances from the first half of the 1960s with Hellhammer rawness behind. Solo is a total wash. It’s not the kind of fuckery everyone will be able to level with, but the big end and sampled laughs at the end of Nightstick‘s time are a fair enough lead into Fistula, who begin with outright slaughter disguised as “The Toll.” Denser in tone than when I last encountered them, the last of Cadaver Monuments‘ four features roll disgustingly slow and top their harsh-your-mellow megasludge with gnashing, nodule-forming, actually-sounds-like-a-monster monstrous vocals — the whisper to kill yourself before the mosh riff notwithstanding — and from there “The Toll” hits into grindcore, which is both long established in Fistula‘s wheelhouse and, frankly, called for by the proceedings to this point.
I won’t say much for the sentiment behind “Methican American,” but if you’re so hard up that you’re going to Fistula for kindnesses, I recommend a hasty rethink on your entire life. Going fast to slow to fast to slow to fast and injecting low growls under the manic gnashing, the song comes across, well, like it went to Fistula for kindnesses. It and split-capper “Words Decompose” are thick like the concrete in the foundation of a new federal prison, with double-kick furthering the assault as the third of Fistula‘s three inclusion lumbers through its verse. They’ll finish quiet — which is hilarious — but answer the call to violence of 16 earlier with their own urgency. It is not the wildest, most insane I’ve ever heard Fistula sound, and it’s metal-based more than punk, but if they’re methodical in their killing, they’re no less lethal for that.
16 got together in 1991, Nightstick in 1992, Fistula in 1998, and Deadbird in 2002 with a pedigree that goes back farther. For its 50th release, Totem Cat Records embraced the chance to thank its audience, to give the people who’ve followed the label’s growth something special, and to communicate the ethics by which it at least in part operates. These are not short-term bands who tried to make a flash-in-the-pan impact and faded away when the next thing came along on Bandcamp. These are acts who’ve stood up to time and whose respective approaches vary but are uniformly uncompromising. That’s setting a high standard to attain, but the label should be used to that by now too.
